


Nobody Fucks with our Pack, Derek

by DiscontentedWinter



Series: I Know Where Babies Come From, Derek [3]
Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Canonical Character Death, HEA, I promise, Kid Fic, M/M, Sequel, Sheriff Stilinski's Name is John, Threats of Rape/Non-Con, but everything will be okay, more tags to be added as needed, not tagging everything because of spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-06
Updated: 2016-02-16
Packaged: 2018-05-18 13:11:50
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 14
Words: 36,082
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5929651
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DiscontentedWinter/pseuds/DiscontentedWinter
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There's no such thing as "unthinkable" in Beacon Hills.<br/>But this comes close.<br/>And Stiles and Derek are going to do everything they can to keep their pack together.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Derek Hale is the unofficial poster boy of the Beacon Hills Sheriff’s Department. He’s hot, okay? The local newspaper loves to put his picture up on any story vaguely related to the department, and last month Stiles stumbled over an anonymous Facebook fan page and everything. Stiles thinks it’s the greatest thing ever, but while Derek has grudgingly accepted this as a part of his job he never signed up for, he puts his foot down when it comes to being Mr. February.

It’s hilarious.

“Oh, come on, Der!” Stiles teases. “February is Valentine's Day! You’d probably get to hold a little heart-shaped candy box over your junk.” He catches Derek’s unimpressed glare. “I mean, a big heart-shaped candy box! Huge!”

“Stiles,” Derek says, and pinches the bridge of his nose. “I’m not doing it!”

Stiles looks around the bullpen for support. He sees Parrish grinning, and the sheriff shaking his head slightly. “Come on! Do you really want those asshole firefighters to get all the glory?”

“Look,” Derek says with a sigh, “if the fire department wants to raise money with a calendar, that’s their business. And if we’re going to jump on that bandwagon too, that’s fine, but I am not going to be a part of it!”

“I’m doing it,” Parrish says, and then shrugs and grins. “It’s for _charity_ , Hale.”

“Charity,” Stiles echoes innocently, eyes wide. “It’s for puppies and orphans and stuff.”

“Actually it’s to raise money to build a shelter for homeless teens,” John Stilinski pipes up. “I’m going to be Mr. July.”

Stiles’s jaw drops. “Oh. My. God. Dad, no! I can’t be expected to buy a calendar featuring hot cops, and have thirty-one whole days of _you_!”

John grins and pats his belly. “What? You think I don’t still have it?”

Derek’s smile is one part sunshine and three parts gleeful schadenfreude.

“You’re my dad!” Stiles gasps. “Not only do you not have it now, you never had it. No, not at all.”

“Oh, please,” Erica exclaims, sashaying into the bullpen and twirling her cuffs on her finger. “Your dad totally has it!”

“Deputy Reyes,” John says, mouth twitching as he fights a smile. “Do you need to watch the video on inappropriate workplace behaviour again?”

“No, sir,” Erica grins. “Although it gave me some great ideas.”

Stiles huffs.

His life is seriously weird. He spent so long as a teenager trying to protect his dad from the supernatural what-the-fuckery that was life in Beacon Hills, and what happens? Half of Derek’s pack ends up joining the department. Well, just Derek and Erica actually, but Erica’s personality is so big that she sometimes feels like at least three or four people. Also, she’s a terrible deputy. She gave Stiles a speeding ticket last month, and just cackled when he tried to talk his way out of it.

Parrish is also kind of pack, almost. He’s dating Lydia, and he’s _something_. Nobody’s quite sure what yet. They only know he’s fireproof. Literally fireproof. It’s a little bit freaky, but Parrish is a good guy. He’s proved that time and time again. Not that any guy is good enough for Lydia...

Yes, Stiles still has a crush on her. He’s been nurturing it since third grade, so it’s not like it’s going to go anywhere now, even though Stiles is allegedly an adult, and is definitely a married man. What? He still has eyes. Okay, so those eyes are usually trained on Derek’s ass, or his abs, or his gorgeous fucking face, but there will always be a place in Stiles’s heart, and sometimes his spank bank—he’s a terrible person—for the gloriousness that is Lydia Martin.

“I’m Ms. January,” Erica says, putting on hand on her hip and tossing her head back. “This is me, striking a pose.”

“Very effective,” Stiles admits, but his whole enthusiasm for the calendar thing has definitely shriveled up and died since his dad’s announcement. His dad is not a sex symbol, okay? He’s a middle-aged man who’s getting a little squishy around the edges, and he is not for strangers to ogle. He has _grandchildren_ , for god’s sake. And speaking of...

Stiles turns around as the kids head into the bullpen, clutching their candy from the vending machine in the break room. Claudie is holding a packet of chips out of Luke’s reach. Luke’s face is screwed up like he’s about to lose his shit any second now. Conor is trailing a little behind his brother and sister, concentrating as he tears the wrapper of his peanut butter cup open.

“Okay then,” Stiles tells them. “Let’s let Daddy and Grandpa get back to work, huh? Criminals won’t just catch themselves.”

“Tata!” Luke exclaims.

“Claudie, share your chips,” Stiles says, leading by example and reaching over to snaffle some. “Tata tax.”

Claudie rolls her eyes, unimpressed. She is so Derek’s kid. She might have looked like Stiles as a baby, but she looks more and more like Derek every passing day. Slap a leather jacket and some aviators on her, and she could brood as well as any sourwolf.

Conor is a mini-Stiles, all the way down to the moles and the unholy love of peanut butter cups.

Luke is a redhead, something that surprised Stiles to begin with since he’s fairly certain that Luke is also biracial, and led him into researching the MC1R gene. Turns out that not all redheads are white. Genetically, Luke has a lot going on. He’s also a werewolf, like Derek and Claudie. Apart from that though, Stiles and Derek still have no idea where he came from. Stiles sometimes worries that it will be an issue when Luke gets older, that it won’t be enough to assure him that he’s pack, and that Tata and Daddy are as much his real parents as they are Claudie and Conor’s. Mostly Stiles worries because he knows that shit would have really bothered him if he’d had to deal with it when he was growing up, but so far Luke has been super relaxed about everything. He rolls with the punches. Okay, he’s only three, but Stiles sort of hopes it’s the kind of trait he’ll keep as he grows up. Luke is chill as fuck about most things.

Except chips. He will cut a bitch who gets between him and chips.

He’s dancing from foot to foot now, looking pleadingly at Claudie until she relents and passes him the packet.

“Get over here and give Grandpa a hug before you leave,” John says, and the kids rush him.

Stiles watches, shaking his head, and plants his ass on Derek’s desk. “So, I’ll see you at eleven?”

“Don’t jinx it,” Derek mutters, but a smile tugs the corner of his mouth. “I’ll text you if I end up with overtime. Don’t wait up though, okay?”

“Okay,” Stiles says. “See you later.”

He leans down and kisses Derek. Derek grunts with surprise before he reaches up and tangles his fingers in Stiles’s hair. Then he runs his tongue along Stiles’s bottom lip and into his mouth, turning the impromptu kiss into something way too hot and filthy to be doing in front of John. Or anyone, probably.

“Gross!” Claudie exclaims, while Parrish stifles a laugh.

Stiles breaks away, feeling like the breath’s been sucked right out of his lungs. He takes a moment to compose himself before standing up again. Then, his head held high and a grin plastered across his face, he leads his kids toward the front of the station.

“Deputy Hale,” he hears his dad say, his tone tempered with fondness, “I think you and Reyes can watch the video together.”

Erica howls with laughter.

 

***

 

There’s a storm that night. It rolls in early, and breaks suddenly. All the trees in the Preserve shake and shudder under it. Lightning cracks the sky. Storms make Stiles a little edgy. He turns the music up in the kitchen as he and the kids make dinner. Well, he and Claudie and Conor. Luke is in charge of putting the loaf of bread on the table, and he still manages to mess that up.

“The table, kiddo,” Stiles tells him. “Not the chair.”

Luke squishes the loaf and beams proudly at Stiles.

Claudie is mashing potatoes to the beat of _It’s Raining Men_ , spinning in circles in front of the counter occasionally. Conor is fixated on getting the juice levels exactly even in their cups. Stiles takes care of the chicken and the rest of the vegetables. He makes sure to set aside a plate for Derek, wrapping it in foil and putting it in the fridge so Derek can heat it up again when he gets home. Derek always tells him not to bother, that he can make a sandwich or something, but fuck that. When Stiles first met Derek he was living in the burned out remains of his family home. Shortly after that he upgraded to a filthy abandoned railway depot. So yes, Derek will always have a meal waiting for him, whatever shift he’s working. It might take Stiles a lifetime to make Derek accept that he deserves nice things, but it’s a battle he’s going to win.

“Tata?” Claudie asks when they’re sitting around the kitchen table eating. “Can I have a sleepover at Emily’s house this Saturday?”

Stiles does a quick mental calculation. “Sure thing. Get Emily’s mom to call me with the details.”

Claudie smiles. “I will!”

It’s a new moon on the weekend. Claudie has excellent control for a growing wolf, but Stiles and Derek are still wary of letting her out of their sight close to the full moon. It would only take a fraction of a second for her to accidentally out werewolves to the general population. Or, worse, to hurt someone. They trust her, but they also have to be careful.

Claudie has a little group of friends she adores and who adore her in turn. Stiles figures it’ll last right up until they all turn into teenage bitches from hell—teenage girls are _scary_ —but for now they’re still all as cute as buttons and it’s been plain sailing with Claudie.

Stiles doesn’t miss the envious look that Conor throws at Claudie.

His heart sinks a little.

Conor doesn’t have any friends who invite him to their houses or to play on weekends. Stiles is afraid that Conor doesn’t have any friends at all. Kids are perceptive. They’re also as cruel as fuck. They know that Conor is different. Weird. They avoid him instinctively like it might be contagious.

After dinner Stiles drags out _Trouble_ , and they play a few rounds. Then he sends the kids upstairs to shower and get ready for bed. He cleans up the kitchen and listens to them giggling and laughing in the shower, the sound only deafened by the occasional crack of thunder.

Stiles is halfway through the dishes when the power goes out and plunges the house into darkness.

He freezes for a moment—old memories crowding him with panic—before he shakes it off and grabs the flashlight from the top of the refrigerator. He can hear wailing. He takes the steps two at a time, and hurries into the bathroom.

“Everyone okay?” he asks.

Claudie is already out of the shower, in her pajamas. Her eyes flash gold in the darkness. “Luke got scared, but he’s okay now. Conor made it better.”

Stiles opens the shower door.

Conor and Luke are sitting on the shower floor, both of them cross-legged. They’re hunched over, staring into Conor’s cupped hands. At first Stiles thinks of fireflies. Tiny little sparks of light are zipping around in Conor’s hands, sparking like fireworks when the water from the shower hits them. Both boys look equally enthralled.

It’s beautiful.

It’s also incredibly powerful, and should be impossible for a six-year-old boy to do. Stiles has met sparks and mages who can’t master a skill like that without decades of training behind them. Hell, he’s a spark himself, at least in name. In practice he’s always been more of a squib. He can sense magic, and he has a good grasp of the theoretical side of it, but to simply reach into the ether and use his will to manipulate atoms and molecules the way that Conor can? That shit is way above Stiles’s skillset.

Conor Stilinski-Hale is probably the most powerful mage who has ever existed in this reality, and there is not a single day that goes by when Stiles doesn’t think of that, or worry about the implications of that much power at the fingertips of a little kid who still cries sometimes when he doesn’t get his way. But then he sees moments like these, when Conor only wants to use his magic to make his little brother happy, and he thinks that, just maybe, it’ll be okay. Just maybe Conor’s control is as instinctual as his power.

Stiles reaches into the shower and turns it off. “Okay, you two. Get dried off and get dressed.”

Conor spreads his fingers, and the little dancing lights vanish back to wherever they came from. Luke makes a sad noise, but stands up and climbs out of the shower into the towel Claudie has waiting for him.

“Tata,” Conor says a little later when he’s brushing his teeth. “Can we sleep with you tonight?”

Stiles thinks about it for a moment. All those pointy little elbows? Then another rumble of thunder rattles the windows, and decides it for him. “Last one in my bed is a rotten egg!”

He races his giggling kids into his bedroom, leaps over the snoring dog, and dives into bed.

  


***

 

The storm passes over Beacon Hills, leaving rain behind.

Stiles wakes up when Derek’s in the process of carrying the kids to their own beds. He rolls over and is jabbed in the ribs by the corner of whatever book Claudie was reading. He shoves it onto the floor with a thump.

“How was your shift?” he mumbles into the pillow when Derek at last climbs into bed beside him.

Derek reaches for him and pulls him against him so that Stiles’s back is plastered to his front. He rubs his face against Stiles’s neck. His beard tickles a little.

“Good,” Derek says, curling his fingers over Stiles’s hip. “Nothing exciting.”

“Good,” Stiles echoes happily, slipping back into sleep.

That night he dreams of the Nemeton for the first time in years.

 

 


	2. Chapter 2

Stiles wakes up to rain pattering gently on the window. Outside it’s a cool, overcast day. Perfect bed weather. Stiles slides his arm over onto Derek’s side of the bed and finds it already empty. Derek has never got the hang of sleeping in. Which, with a house full of kids, is actually a good thing. Less work for Stiles. By the time Stiles trails downstairs, breakfast is already on the kitchen table and the kids are digging in.

“Morning,” Stiles mumbles, doing the rounds and planting a kiss on each kid’s head. Luke wipes a crust of toast through Stiles’s hair. It’s too early for Stiles to care.

He leans against the kitchen counter and watches Derek cook.

What? Derek happens to be cooking in only a pair of boxer shorts. His Facebook fans would give their right arms to be where Stiles is right now, and Stiles can’t blame them. Derek is hot like the sun. That face. Those abs. That ass. And the best part? All of that just happens to be the ridiculously attractive packaging. Underneath, Derek is even better.

He’s... well, Stiles could write a list, but that would take a lifetime. Even Hallmark doesn’t have enough superlatives to come close to describing what Derek is to Stiles. He’s Stiles’s _everything_.

“Bacon?” Derek asks him.

“I love you.”

Derek smirks. “I take it that’s a yes?”

“It is a yes,” Stiles confirms, edging close to Derek and putting an arm around him. “But also I love you for more than bacon, Derek.”

Derek kisses him. “Love you too.”

Stiles knows. It’s written in his bones. It’s his cornerstone. Derek proves it to him every day. He’s fought for Stiles. He’s been willing to die for Stiles. He’d go to hell and back for Stiles. But it’s not just that. It’s in the tiny things too. It’s in bacon, and kisses, and the smile that he saves just for Stiles and the kids. The gentle, secret smile that nobody else ever sees. The curve of it is the exact shape of love.

Jesus. When did Stiles turn into such a sap?

Also, who the fuck cares? Stiles has no regrets. He’s in love with Derek and Derek is in love with him. He’s winning at life. He has plenty of other outlets to direct his jaded cynicism and magnificent sarcasm into. That’s what the internet is for.

“I don’t start work until three,” Derek says, setting some perfectly crisped bacon onto a plate for Stiles. “I thought I’d take the kids out into the Preserve.”

“Um, Derek, hello? It’s _raining_.”

“Um, hello,” Derek shoots back, “we’re not made of _sugar_.”

Stiles snorts. “Dick.”

“Tata said a bad word!” Conor yells.

Luke shrieks, just to join in.

“Tata said a very bad word,” Derek agrees. His tone is full of judginess, but his eyebrows are amused. “And Tata is very sorry, isn't he?”

“Totally sorry!” Stiles agrees, and grabs his plate of bacon.

“Do you want something else with that, or just bacon?”

“Just bacon,” Stiles decides, and reaches past Derek to snag a piece of toast from the toaster. “Perfect!”

“So, the Preserve,” Derek says. “Want to come with us?”

Stiles mentally juggles his schedule in his head.

Stiles works from home. He designs websites. It’s pretty boring, actually, but it suits him with the kids. He’s finally managed to finish his college degree, in Sociology, and he sometimes feels guilty for not using it for anything more than the cheap thrill of sometimes writing B.A. (Hons) (Sociol.) after his name. He’s thought about going back to do postgraduate studies, but it doesn’t seem worth it. He’s busy enough designing websites, and being the emissary for the Hale-McCall pack.

His dad always said he didn’t have a diplomatic bone in his body, but Stiles has learned to be incredibly diplomatic when it’s the safety of his family and friends at stake. His pack. Just last year he negotiated with a pack from Oregon who wanted to visit Beacon Hills for a few months. First Stiles had made sure they weren’t going to try and attack to gain the power of the Nemeton. The Hale-McCall territory is a lot more interesting to predators now they know there’s an ancient druidic power source just sitting here. But the Oregon pack had no ulterior motive except a human pack member who was seeking treatment at the Beacon Hills hospital. Turns out that one of the doctors there is a specialist in prosthetics, and the pack member had lost a foot in a bear trap. Stiles had not only facilitated a treaty between the packs, he’d turned up at the hospital after the kid’s first session with balloons, video games and cake. Stiles is not the most traditional emissary.

He’s also seen off more than a few threats, but he won’t pretend that has anything to do with his diplomacy skills. That’s totally down to the fact that he has a pack of werewolves at his back including _two_ alphas, and he also swings a baseball bat like nobody’s business. He gets his hands dirty when the situation calls for it.

So yeah, the chances of him actually getting use out of that sociology degree are pretty slim. In the meantime, he brings in a bit of money with the whole website thing, and raises his kids, and fights for his pack.

It’s never boring.

“Sure,” he says, taking a seat beside Luke and shoveling bacon into his mouth. “But if I get pneumonia, you’ll have to carry me home and nurse me back to health.”

“Naturally,” Derek says dryly.

“Daddy, can we visit the Nemeton?” Conor asks eagerly.

“Okay,” Derek says, catching Stiles’s gaze.

Ugh.

The Nemeton.

Having an ancient druidic power source smack bang in the middle of pack land is a little like living next door to a nuclear missile silo. As in, it’s not at all comforting. Stiles knows that the Nemeton is neither good nor evil, but it’s _powerful_ , and its power draws a lot of strange things to Beacon Hills. Stiles is wary of the Nemeton. He treats it with respect.

Conor, naturally, loves it.

Whenever they visit Conor climbs on the stump to proudly inspect the size of the new sapling growing from a crack in the middle of the dead wood, and beams at it and talks to it, and sometimes giggles like it’s telling him a joke. He’s connected to the life force of the Nemeton in a way Stiles never will be. Sometimes Conor spends a little time with the Nemeton and then tells Stiles all about the new things in the Preserve. A nest of fledglings, a fox’s burrow, a fallen tree or a new one, or old animal bones uncovered by rain. The Nemeton watches over the Preserve and shares with Conor the things that it witnesses in some silent language that Stiles doesn’t understand. In turn, Conor tells the Nemeton about school, and the pack, and the things that he’s feeling.

It’s a little terrifying, really, because Stiles doesn’t doubt for a second that the Nemeton is becoming more and more conscious, possibly even sentient. And it’s a part of Conor in a way that Stiles can’t even begin to comprehend. It has been since before he was born.

“Only if you wear your raincoat,” Stiles instructs Conor.

Conor makes a face.

“You two as well,” Stiles tells Luke and Claudie.

Luke doesn’t care, but Claudie rolls her eyes. “It’s not like _we_ can get sick, Tata!”

“Claudia Talia Stilinksi-Hale,” Stiles cautions. “Less of the attitude.”

God. He is such a _parent_. It still catches him by surprise some days.

Claudie huffs and mutters something under her breath. Possibly something about how at least she didn’t say _dick_.

Derek smirks to himself as he starts to wash the dishes.

“Leave those, Der,” Stiles instructs. “I think our daughter just volunteered to do them. Right, Claudie?”

“Yes,” she mutters unhappily.

Stiles grins at her glower. He is all over this parenting shit this morning. It’s going to be a good day.

 

***

 

An hour later they’re in the Preserve, and Claudie has forgotten to be in a bad mood. She and Luke are half-shifted, racing around the trees while Derek pretends to stalk them.

Wolves.

Its their thing.

And sitting with Conor at the Nemeton is Stiles’s thing.

“Tata,” Conor asks after a while, “how come the other kids at school don’t like me?”

Stiles’s heart sinks. So much for his good day.

“Nobody wants to be my friend,” Conor whispers, like it’s a secret.

Stiles feels himself tearing up, and forces a smile. “I’m sure they will, once they get to know you, okay?”

He’s so glad Conor’s not a wolf. So glad he can’t hear the lie. Because Conor is amazing, okay? He’s incredible. But he’s also different, and the kids at school can tell. Kids don’t know what to do with different, with _weird_. Stiles was the same, except he was lucky enough to have Scott. Where the hell is Conor’s Scotty McCall—one part childish naivety and three parts pure sunshine—when he needs him?

They didn’t go through this with Claudie. She’s a wolf, but her control is excellent. She’s never had a problem making friends. And Luke is too little for it to matter. He has a new best friend at daycare every other week. Little kids are great at going with the flow. But Conor... Conor’s already been marked as different by his peers, and that’s a label that sticks.

He’s only in First Grade, and it’s already a disaster.

“Okay, Tata,” Conor says earnestly, and that might be the most heartbreaking thing. That he believes Stiles.

Stiles glances out past the clearing. Derek has stopped chasing the kids, and is gazing back at him. Either he heard them talking, or he can smell the sudden unhappy souring of Stiles’s scent.

Stiles forces a smile, and nods at him to let him know they’re okay for now. Then he turns his attention back to Conor, but Conor is already distracted by the Nemeton. Stiles hunkers down beside it, toying with a fallen leaf, while Conor sits on the stump and runs his fingers over the cracks on its surface. They do this at least a few afternoons a week, otherwise Conor gets antsy. Stiles sometimes worries that whatever this is to Conor, it’s an addiction, or a compulsion, or something, and that fostering that sort of dependence in a six-year-old isn’t healthy. Then he remembers that the normal rules don’t apply. Hell, that’s even supposing there _are_ any normal rules for kid/tree relationships.

Out of all his kids Stiles doesn’t have a favorite—he’s not an asshole—but of course Conor is the kid he identifies with the most. He human, and he looks exactly like Stiles did at that age. And he’ll grow up looking like Stiles too. Stiles knows, because he’s met Conor before, or at least an alternative version of Conor. And he knows Conor could pass for his twin, if they weren’t twenty years apart. Well, nineteen. Stiles was totally a teen dad. Well, a teen mom. Magic. It’s kind of fucked up. And Conor inherited his looks, his crazy hair, his moles, his ADD, and all his weirdness. He didn’t inherit Stiles’s spark. Conor is much, much more than a spark, which is another thing Stiles and Derek struggle with at times. How do you raise a kid who can theoretically manipulate space and time, but still has trouble tying his own shoelaces? Luckily Conor doesn’t understand his own power yet. He doesn’t know what he can do. And Stiles needs him to not be an angry, hurt little kid when he figures it out.

He does not want to raise Kylo Ren.

That ended pretty badly for the dad in that scenario, right?

He watches as Conor traces his fingers carefully over a crack in the stump.

“Tata,” Conor says, a tiny frown creasing his forehead.

“What?”

“Tata, last night there was a wolf in the Preserve.”

Stiles’s heartbeat stutters. “What do you mean?”

He leans forward and puts his hand on the Nemeton. He feels the same low buzz of energy he always does.

“A wolf,” Conor repeats. “It’s gone now.”

Stiles stands up. His throat is dry. An omega? Not the worst of all the scenarios Stiles can come up with, but not great either. The pack will need to patrol until they can either make sure the interloper is no threat, or, if he is, get rid of him. “Derek?”

Derek is at his side in an instant, Claudie and Luke panting behind him.

Stiles fills him in on the walk back to the house.

 

***

 

“I didn’t smell a thing,” Derek says once they’re back at the house. “Fucking rain.”

Stiles looks expectantly at the kids, because come on! _Fucking_ is so much worse than _dick_. But the kids are all too on edge to worry about Daddy saying a rude word.

Derek looks at his watch.

“Go to work,” Stiles tells him firmly. “The house is warded, it’s broad daylight, and if any strange wolf gets within twenty feet of the front door I’ll introduce him to enough wolfsbane to sink the Bismarck. Had the Bismarck been susceptible to wolfsbane, obviously.”

“I want you to be safe. I don’t want you to worry, okay?”

“I’m not worried,” Stiles tells him firmly. “And I am not Princess Peach.”

Derek’s eyebrows do something complicated. “I don’t understand that reference.”

“Of course you don’t,” Stiles tells him. “I’m saying I don’t always need rescuing, okay? I can take care of myself almost ninety percent of the time. Well, eighty. Okay, at least seventy-five, but no lower.”

“Seventy-five,” Derek agrees wryly.

“Nobody fucks with our pack, Derek,” Stiles tells him. “Nobody.”

“Nobody,” Derek echoes firmly, but he makes sure Stiles locks the door behind him when he leaves for work.

 

***

 

Derek gets home late. The kids are already in bed, asleep.

There is a very narrow window of opportunity for special quality adult time in a house with three kids, and Stiles is an expert at seizing the moment. He has his pants off before Derek’s even climbed the stairs.

Stiles shivers as Derek traces the triskele tattoo on his back with his fingertips. Stiles got it when Conor was still a baby. He’d passed out in the chair in the tattoo parlor, even though Scott had been with him to take the pain. It wasn’t just the pain, okay? It was the needles. And the blood. After the trauma of Conor’s birth, Stiles had been even more squeamish than usual.

It was totally worth it though.

Derek loves the tattoo. It matches his, and it speaks to Derek’s wolf in a way that words can’t: _pack, mine, mate._ Derek likes to lick it when he’s fucking Stiles from behind. Stiles is kind of a fan of that position himself. And of all the other positions. His husband is a hot-as-fuck werewolf with more abs than literally humanly possible, and yes, Stiles is that shallow. Except he’s also not just that shallow, because he and Derek love one another. Stiles has never doubted that Derek has his back, and he has Derek’s. That says a lot more in a town like Beacon Hills than roses and chocolates and sickly sweet Hallmark sentiments.

Not that they don’t have those as well.

“I love you, Stiles,” Derek whispers now, his hot breath feathering the damp hair behind Stiles’s ear.

“Love you too, Der. Love you so much.” He tilts his head so Derek can press his fangs against the juncture of his throat and his shoulder. “Love you.”

Stiles has always got moments like these to fall back on, and to draw strength from him.

He’s Stiles Stilinski. He runs with wolves, and he’s winning at life.

 


	3. Chapter 3

On Monday, Stiles gets the call at eleven.

When he gets to the school, Luke on his hip, the first thing he sees is Claudie standing under a tree at the edge of the playground. There are a few teachers standing near her, under a cluster of umbrellas. One of them is Mrs. Landerson, the principal. One of them is Conor’s teacher. Stiles doesn’t recognize the others.

“Tata!” Claudie exclaims when she sees him. Her little body sags with relief. “Tata, Conor climbed a tree and won’t come down!”

Stiles looks up into the branches of the tree. “Conor? Kiddo?”

Conor’s tear-stained face stares down at him miserably, wreathed in wet leaves.

Stiles turns to the teachers and Mrs. Landerson. “Can you give me a minute, please?”

The teachers move away.

“Hey, Conor,” Stiles says. “What’s going on?”

Conor hugs the branch tighter.

“All the other kids in his class got invited to a birthday party, except him,” Claudie says, showing Stiles a murderous scowl. She’s fiercely protective of Conor, and has been ever since he was born. She knows her baby brother is a human, and therefore breakable. Even Luke, at three years old, knows he has to hold back when he roughhouses with six-year-old Conor. “ _All_ of them!”

Stiles’s heart sinks.

Fuck the birthday kid, and fuck the kid’s evil fucking parents if they think that it is in any way okay to ostracise a child like that. Stiles knows exactly what that feels like for a kid. _Exactly_. Except Stiles always had Scott, at least. Conor doesn’t have a friend like that. Stiles is afraid Conor doesn’t have any friends at all.

From up in the tree, Conor starts to cry; huge gulping sobs that shake his small body and the branch he’s clinging to. Rain shakes loose from the shuddering leaves.

Conor’s tears set off Luke, who’s a sympathetic crier. Stiles tries to bounce him out of it, but he’s already too far gone. Still, better crying than flashing his eyes and clawing the fuck out of everything. Werewolves, seriously.

“Conor?” Stiles swallows around the painful lump in his throat. “Come on down, kid, please?”

The tree is at the front of the elementary school, and Stiles can see Conor’s classroom from here. He wonders how many of the kids are watching. He wonders how many of them will steer clear of the weird Stilinski-Hale kid from now on. Because this is the sort of shit that kids remember. This is the sort of shit that will make Conor a social outcast for the rest of his school life, and it’s not fair.

It’s so not fucking fair.

“Conor?” he asks again.

Conor wails, and Stiles’s heart breaks on the wavering note of his son’s misery. He passes Luke over to Claudie, and rubs his hands on his jeans. Then, because he can’t think of anything else to do, he climbs the tree as well.

 

***

 

Apparently refusing to come down from a tree on school property, if you’re an adult, is classed as trespassing. And apparently that gets the police involved. It’s a whole thing.

“Hey, Dad,” Stiles says when the sheriff arrives on the scene. At least it’s not Derek. Or Erica. Although Erica would probably climb the tree too. She’s cool with Stiles’s out-of-the-box thinking.

 _“Out of the box?”_ Derek had muttered once when Erica had called it that. _“More like off the planet.”_

It would have been a much more effective burn if Derek hadn’t liked Stiles so much he put a ring on it. That lifetime commitment very much invalidates every insult Derek flings at him. Checkmate, snarkywolf.

“Stiles,” his dad says. “Conor okay up there?”

Stiles winks at a still-teary-eyed Conor. “We’re both good.”

Stiles leaves it to his dad to try and reason with an increasingly annoyed Mrs. Landerson. He edges closer to Conor’s branch, ignoring the fact that every time he shifts he cops wet leaves in the face and a mini waterfall down his back, and reaches up to pat Conor on the back.

Conor sniffles. “I’m sorry, Tata.”

“I know you are, kiddo,” Stiles says. It’s hard to remind Conor that he has to play by the rules though when he’s sitting in the same tree.

Stiles rubs Conor’s back and looks down out of the tree again.

Claudie is standing at the base of the tree, holding Luke’s hand. Claudie has a stubborn lift to her chin that she totally gets from Derek. Luke is trying to look stubborn too, taking his cue from his big sister. He’s sucking his thumb though, which ruins the effect a little, but not the sentiment. His little wolf sentinels, looking after their human packmates.

“Tata, I want to go home,” Conor whispers.

“Okay,” Stiles agrees. “Okay, let’s get down, yeah?”

Conor nods, and bursts into tears again.

 

***

 

Stiles is banned from Beacon Hills Elementary School property, but his dad talks Mrs. Landerson out of pressing charges for trespass.

And Conor is suspended.

“He’s six!” Stiles exclaims. “You can’t just suspend him! The other—”

He breaks off before he says what he’s thinking in Conor’s hearing. That the other kids will think he’s a freak. He tempers his tone. “Please. Is there another option here?”

Something that might actually be pity flashes across Mrs. Landerson’s face. “I’m sorry, Mr. Stilinski. I really don’t have a choice. I would also recommend you consider having Conor speak to a specialist.”

“You can’t seriously—”

“Stiles,” John says, dropping a heavy hand on Stiles’s shoulder. “Take Conor and Luke home. I’ll collect Claudie after school.”

“Dad!”

Mrs. Landerson looks at him like she knows exactly where all Conor’s behavioural problems come from. Stiles wants to punch her in the face. Okay, not really, because he is an adult, and parent, and he has to set a good example for his kids. But he would totally slash her tires and key her car.

“Go home, Stiles,” John says firmly. “Let me handle this. And I’ll send Derek home as soon as he’s finished at his break and enter.”

Stiles hugs Claudie goodbye, and heads to the parking lot with the boys.

He makes it halfway home before he has to pull the Camaro over because he can’t see clearly. And he can't blame it on the weather either. 

“Tata?” Conor asks from the backseat.

“Yeah, kiddo?”

“I just wanted to go to Madison’s party, Tata.”

Stiles’s throat aches. He clenches his hands around the steering wheel. “I know you did, Conor. But you can’t act out when things happen that you don’t like, okay?”

“I just want them to like me!” Conor whines.

“I know you do,” Stiles says, fighting to keep his voice even. “I know.”

It wasn’t supposed to be this hard. Well, the supernatural shit was always going to be a challenge, but not the everyday stuff like school. Conor’s too much like Stiles. And Stiles can still remember, acutely, how it felt to be the weird kid. The outsider. The freak.

“Tata,” Luke pipes up. “Whoops!”

Stiles turns around to see that Luke’s squeezed his juice box all over his car seat, and the interior of the car.

The poor Camaro. Ten years ago it was a beast. Now it’s a sad shell of its former self, with bits of broken crayon squished into the upholstery, grubby hand marks inside every window, and dirty footprints on the backs of the seats. And on the dash. And the ones on the dash might belong to Stiles. But hey, he didn’t start it. The kids did. And it’s partly Derek’s fault. He refuses to let Stiles drive the kids around in his old Jeep because it’s unsafe, even though at least two of the kids are pretty much unbreakable.

“We’ll clean it up when we get home,” Stiles tells him with a sigh, and pulls the car back onto the road again.

And maybe it’s the tears in his eyes, and maybe it’s because he’s checking on the boys in the rearview, or maybe he’s just shit out of luck. Whatever it is, Stiles doesn’t even see the deer until it’s bouncing off the hood of the car.

He brakes, twists the wheel— _stupid, stupid, stupid_ —and the car slides sideways on the wet road, and Stiles sees the trees coming up fast.

Then the whole world tips upside down, the boys are screaming, and Stiles’s head smacks into the window. The crack is the last thing he hears before everything goes dark.

 

***

 

The boys are crying.

Stiles blinks his eyes open.

The world is still upside down.

Through the busted windshield Stiles sees a pair of legs. He blinks to try and clear his vision, but he can’t. Everything is fuzzy and indistinct.

“Tata! Tata!”

Stiles doesn’t know what’s happening or where he is.

The upside-down person crouches down.

Red eyes flash.

Alpha red.

“Tata!” Conor cries.

Glass smashes.

“Tata!” This time it’s Luke. “Tata!”

He wails, long and protracted, and why is that sound getting further and further away?

Stiles tries to move.

He blacks out again.

 

***

 

“Stiles?”

Okay, so this is new. He’s in a hospital bed. What even...?

“ _Stiles?_ ”

Oh shit. The Camaro. Derek is going to be pissed.

Oh shit. The _boys_.

Panic grips him as he struggles into something closer to wakefulness, and Derek is holding his hand, drawing his pain in inky black lines that climb his forearm. His face is pale, his mouth a thin line.

“What...” It’s too much effort to finish the question.

“Stiles,” Derek says, and Stiles can almost taste the fear rolling off him in waves. “Stiles, where’s Luke?”

The world fractures for the second time that day.

 

***

 

It’s hours before Derek is allowed to take Stiles home. He sits slumped in the front of Derek’s cruiser, mind still buzzing, unable to focus, because this can’t be real. This can’t be real at all. Except they pass the Camaro, still upside down and wedged into a tree at the side of the road. It’s almost dark now, and there are forensics guys with a light array taking photographs and fingerprints, despite the gently pattering rain.

Stiles stares down at his hands, shaking in his lap. “I don’t know what happened.”

Derek nods and swallows.

“Do you hate me?”

“Jesus. Stiles, no!” Derek’s voice cracks. “No.”

He probably doesn’t need to, because Stiles hates himself right now. If he’d been paying attention. If he hadn’t hit that stupid fucking deer. If he’d protected his son instead of just hanging there in his seat belt.

Tears slide down his face.

He sucks in as deep a breath as he can—he has two cracked ribs—and holds it. Closes his eyes and tries to _think_. Except there’s not any way to make this make any sense at all. His can’t concentrate. His mind keeps flashing back to Luke. It’s too big to process. All Stiles can hear is the way Luke’s wail receded as someone took him from the car.

_“Tata!”_

Jesus, no. That can’t be the last thing he hears. It can’t be.

Except what if it is?

Stiles is a cop’s kid. He knows the statistics, okay? He knows what happens to kids who get snatched. If they turn up again at all, it’s in a shallow fucking grave, right?

Except—

Except this is Beacon Hills and Luke is a werewolf.

And whoever was at the car... Their eyes flashed alpha red.

A wolf then. Luke was taken by a wolf. Stiles doesn't know if that's better or worse. 

This is his fault. All his fault.

Luke’s so little. He’s just a baby, really. Just a baby.

Stiles wrenches sideways in his seat, pain tearing through him, and vomits in the footwell. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. Sorry, Der.”

Derek reaches over and grips his shoulder. “We’re going to get him back, Stiles. We’re going to get our son back.”

Stiles cries the rest of the way home.

 

***

 

There are at least six cars parked out the front of the house. The front door is open, and inside it’s a hive of activity. Derek walks Stiles inside with an arm around his shoulders. Chris Argent has taken over the dining room table. A large map of the Preserve is spread out, the edges held down by jars of condiments.

“Chris,” Derek says with a sharp nod.

“Derek.” Chris’s gaze falters when it hits Stiles. Probably because he looks like a fucking mess, and stinks of vomit. “Stiles.”

Lydia steps forward and hugs Stiles quickly. “Jordan and your dad are running things from the station. Scott, Isaac, Liam, Erica and Boyd are trying to get a track in the Preserve. Claudie’s with Scott. She wanted to help.”

Stiles is too numb to do anything except nod.

“Deaton’s working on a locator spell from the clinic,” Lydia continues. “And Allison is making enquiries with any hunters the Argents still have an in with.”

Chris grunts at that, so Stiles figures it’s not many. Chris and Allison have pretty much burned their bridges with the hunter community. Even the more reasonable hunters who actually do more than pay lip service to the Code think Allison is a traitor to the cause.

“Stiles.” Derek cups his face and stares intently into his eyes. “I need to get out there too.”

“Yeah,” Stiles says. Another nod. “Yeah, go find him, Der. Go find Luke.”

_Find him and bring him home._

 

***

 

Stiles finds Conor in Luke’s room. It’s the old nursery. Conor is wedged in the corner, Luke’s closet door pulled open to hide him from view. He’s clutching Luke’s plush wolf to his narrow chest.

“Hey, Conor. You okay, kiddo?”

Conor blinks up at him, his bottom lip trembling.

“Daddy and the pack are going to bring Luke back,” Stiles tells him. “It’s going to happen, Conor.”

“Tata,” Conor whispers, climbing to his feet. He takes Stiles by the hand and pulls him out of the nursery, down the stairs to the front door. “Tata, we have to go to the Nemeton.”

Stiles’s breath catches.

“Stiles?” Chris steps out of the kitchen.

“Tata!” Conor tugs on his hand. “The Nemeton!”

Stiles lets Conor pull him out the door, with Chris following, and into the darkening trees.


	4. Chapter 4

Stiles stumbles through the Preserve, clutching Conor’s hand tightly. Chris Argent is walking several paces behind them, his flashlight more or less illuminating the way. Stiles has no idea what they’re walking into but, at this point, he doesn’t really care. If Conor thinks the Nemeton can help them, who the hell is Stiles to disagree?

The Nemeton is supposed to be a guardian of sorts, isn’t it? It watches over the Preserve. It sees everything that happens. And Conor can communicate with it. Yes, Stiles is very much willing to try and get witness testimony from a tree.

Except it’s not just the Nemeton waiting for them in the clearing.

There’s a man standing there, broad-shouldered and silent.

When Chris’s flashlight hits the guy in the face, for a second Stiles is frozen with shock. Then he recoils, dragging Conor behind him. Because what the everlasting _fuck_?

“Really?” the guy drawls. “The Nemeton summons the pack emissary and it’s _you_? What _was_ Derek thinking?”

“Peter,” Stiles breathes. “Peter Hale.”

The last time Stiles saw Peter Hale was in his junior year of high school. He has vivid memories of setting the motherfucker on fire, actually. And burying him. Definitely setting him on fire and then burying him. It left an impression, okay?

Beside him, he hears the click of a safety being released.

Thank Cthulhu and all his squishy minions for Chris Argent.

“You’re dead,” Stiles says, as though by saying it aloud it will make it true.

“Clearly that’s not the case,” Peter smirks. “I’m very much alive, thank you for noticing.”

“How?” Stiles asks, and shakes his aching head to try and clear it. “No, scratch that. I don’t care. Why are you here?”

“I came to warn you,” Peter says.

“Warn us about what?”

“Stiles,” Peter says, “do you know what an Alpha Pack is?”

Peter’s here, so somehow Stiles regresses instantly to the snarky little smartass shit he was when he was sixteen. “Um, would that be a pack of alphas?”

“Oh, very good,” Peter says, eyes narrowing. “Well, what you might not know is they think you have something of theirs, and they’ve come to claim it.”

Cold floods through Stiles. 

 _Luke_.

Fuck. They’ve come for Luke.

And they’ve got him.

Stiles fumbles for his phone with his spare hand.

“I’m calling Derek to meet us back at the house,” he says. “Chris, if Peter so much as looks at us wrong, put a wolfsbane bullet in his head.”

“Not a problem,” Chris says, his voice steady as though there’s nothing in the world, not even the werewolf version of the walking dead, that can even wrinkle his composure.

When Stiles grows up, he wants to be Chris Argent.

For now though, he’ll just quietly freak the fuck out.

 

***

 

“Holy fucking hell,” Allison says when they get back to the house, and suddenly there’s a crossbow trained on the center of Peter Hale’s chest.

“Yep,” Stiles says, because what else is there to say?

“I like what you’ve done with the place,” Peter says, lifting his chin as he steps through the front door. “Apart from the stench of Argents, of course.”

“Insulting the two people with weapons currently pointed at you,” Stiles mutters. “Smart.”

Peter just smirks. It’s always been his go-to expression.

Stiles points him toward the living room. “Go. Sit. And if you move, they’ll kill you.”

“In my day, emissaries relied more on diplomacy than threats,” Peter tells him.

“Shut the fuck up.” Stiles pulls Conor closer to his side as they follow Peter and the Argents into the living room.

Peter makes a great show of picking the most comfortable chair, and then lounges it in smugly while Allison and Chris take their positions on either side of him. Far enough away to get a shot off if he attacks.

Stiles sits down on the couch on the far side of the room, and Conor sits beside him. Lydia appears, and leans in the doorway. She must be as shocked as everyone else, but she only raises her eyebrows slightly, and catches Stiles’s gaze. “High school reunion?”

Stiles snorts despite himself.

Fucking prom night. Lydia had finally taken pity on Stiles and agreed to go to the dance with him. Okay, she’d been getting revenge on Jackson at the time for whatever dickish thing he’d done that week, and Stiles knew it, but he wasn’t going to look a gift horse like that in the mouth. Lydia Martin wanted to go to prom with him! It had been the pinnacle of all Stiles’s teenage fantasies. Well, the ones involving clothing. And it had ended in a blood-soaked nightmare thanks to Peter Fucking Hale.

Stiles had thought Lydia was dead.

He’d thought he was next.

Frankly, that molotov cocktail had been too good for Peter.

Peter sniffs the air pointedly, then narrows his eyes at Conor. “Well, _that’s_ interesting. Incredible, actually. Perhaps Derek was thinking with his brain for once after all. You’re quite full of surprises, aren’t you, Stiles? Who would have thought little Stiles Stilinski had anything approaching power inside him? Perhaps I should have claimed you first. You could have had my pups instead.”

“I’d rather masturbate vigorously with a cheese grater, actually.”

“Kinky,” Peter murmurs.

“Okay, can someone please shoot him now?” Stiles asks.

Both Allison and Chris look like they’re seriously considering it.

From outside, Stiles hears the roar of an alpha. _Derek_. And then he’s inside the living room, half shifted, claws and fangs and Neanderthal forehead and all.

“Peter,” he snarls around his fangs. “ _Peter!_ ”

“Back off, Derek,” Chris says mildly. “Tear his throat out again and you won’t hear what he has to say.”

Derek snarls at Chris, but shifts back to human.

“Hello, nephew,” Peter says, as the rest of the wolves arrive on Derek’s heels. “Oh, and this must be your pack. Aren’t you going to introduce me?”

Derek growls.

Claudie pushes forward and crawls onto the couch with Stiles and Conor.

“Good heavens!” Peter exclaims. “How old is that child? Seriously, Derek, just how underage was Stiles when you got your dick inside him? I’d say I’m impressed, but it’s really rather disgraceful.”

Derek roars, and Scott joins him.

Stiles waits until his ears stop ringing before he speaks. And he doesn’t have time to waste explaining to Peter how Claudie came about and how it had nothing to do with Derek’s dick. Not in this reality, anyway. “Tell us about the Alpha Pack, and why they took Luke.”

“Took?” Peter appears taken aback for a moment. “Already?”

“Just talk, Peter.”

“I first came across the Alpha Pack a year ago,” Peter says, folding his arms across his chest. “Their leader is Deucalion, also known as the Demon Wolf. A little dramatic, but not unwarranted, given his reputation. I’ve been a little...out of sorts, ever since I came back, so I kept my distance. Then I came across an omega called Tallis—”

“Tallis.” Stiles jolts at the name. It was, what? Six weeks ago? Seven? Tallis had been an asshole of an omega, not interested in joining a pack any more than he was interested in respecting pack boundaries. He’d been a pretty pathetic specimen, actually. Stiles had hardly needed Derek at his side in order to see him off with his baseball bat.

“Yes.” Peter’s sharp gaze finds him. “He said he’d been to Beacon Hills. Had a run in with the pack here, and they sent him off with his tail between his legs. But not before he’d got a sniff of the alpha’s pups. And a look at them.”

Stiles bristles. Tallis had gotten close to the house, but he hadn’t realized _how_ close.

“Well,” Peter says, “let’s just say he realized that one of your pups was not like the others. He might have been a fool, but he knew the Alpha Pack had been looking for their misplaced pup for a while. So he told Deucalion, who ripped his throat out to repay him. When I realized the Alpha Pack was coming here, I came to warn you. Apparently I was too late.”

“Why would you warn us?” Derek growls out.

“Because you’re pack,” Peter says, his lip curling as though he hates the taste of the word.

“Try again,” Stiles says.

Peter sighs. “Because I need the protection of a pack unless I want to end up an omega. I thought I could buy myself back into this one. If the child had the protection of the Alpha of Beacon Hills, and if Derek was still that alpha, well, it seemed like I finally had enough leverage to prevent myself being murdered a second time.”

Stiles holds Derek’s gaze for a moment. Yeah, okay, that sounds just self-serving enough to be the truth.

“How can we find the Alpha Pack?” Derek asks.

For a moment Peter looks genuinely concerned. “Trust me, Derek, you don’t want to.”

Derek’s lip curls.

“But,” Peter says with another sigh, “I’m fairly sure that won’t be a problem.”

“Why is that?” Stiles asks.

“Well, not only were you sheltering one of their pups,” Peter drawls, “you’re also sitting on a Nemeton. You won’t need to find them, children, they’ll be coming for you. Welcome to your first pack war.”

 

***

 

“So, wait,’ Liam says, his forehead creased in a frown. “Who is he again?”

“Peter Hale,” Lydia answers. “Derek’s uncle.” She tugs the neck of her shirt down and shows her scars. “He did this.”

Liam hisses sharply.

“He’s the one who bit me,” Scott adds. “Before Derek killed him and took his alpha power.”

There’s more to tell, probably, but Stiles figures Scott can fill everyone in later. In private. Derek hates talking about the fire that killed his family. He hates talking about Laura. And any conversation they have about Peter is going to bring those things up, as well as the fact that Peter, during his murder spree, also killed Kate Argent. Who was the psychopathic bitch who set the fire to begin with, but still Chris’s sister and Allison’s aunt.

The Argents hate talking about the fire too.

There’s way too much fucking guilt in the room right now.

“I don’t trust him,” Derek says. “But he’s not lying.”

Peter’s currently locked in the basement with a can of beans and a blanket which, frankly, is more hospitality than he deserves.

“Someone call Deaton,” Stiles says. “Get him here. Ally?”

“Yeah,” Allison says, her expression tight. “I’ll see what the hunters know as well.”

“I’ll call your dad,” Derek says. “Let him know it’s supernatural and there isn’t much the Sheriff's Department can do.”

Stiles nods. His dad will keep the deputies working on it anyway, he knows. Partly because it will look suspicious if he calls the search off, and partly because he’ll still want to be doing something. And there’s always a chance there was a witness, who spotted some suspicious people or a car or something out of the ordinary. Stiles will take any lead they have.

“Maybe Deaton’s locator spell will turn something up,” he murmurs.

He needs it to, but locator spells are notoriously tricky. Deaton’s only seem to work half the time, which is still a better success rate than Stiles’s. Stiles is sitting on a big fat zero, even after years of practice. He just doesn’t have enough magic in him.

Conor though...

Conor’s fallen asleep on the couch with his head in Stiles’s lap.

Conor is incredibly powerful, but he’s not good at focussing yet. He’s too little. And Stiles and Deaton have intentionally tried to discourage him from using his magic until he’s old enough to understand the implications. There are always consequences. Once, Conor picked up a dead squirrel in the Preserve. He cupped his hands over it, and then it was wriggling with life again. But around them, a circle of trees and plants withered and died in seconds.

Stiles wonders how exactly Peter Hale came back from the dead, and what it cost. He would prefer not to think about it, but not thinking about things has a way of coming back and biting him in the ass. Him, and everyone around him. So he’s going to need to know exactly what bullshit necromancy Peter pulled, and whether the universe has yet to call that debt in. When it does, Stiles wants Peter a long, long way from Beacon Hills.

But there’s a world of difference between raising someone or something from the dead and a simple locator spell. Right?

Fucking right.

Stiles runs his fingers through Conor’s hair, waking him gently. “Conor? Wake up, buddy.”

Stiles eases himself to his feet as Conor stirs. His head still aches, and his ribs are giving him hell, but he’s okay. It’s not like he was going to be running a marathon anytime soon anyway. And he’s had a lot worse. Because fucking Beacon Hills, that’s why. But every time he’s idly wondered what it would be like to live a normal, boring life, free of all this supernatural shit, Stiles takes a breath and looks at what it’s brought him, and doesn’t regret it for a second. How could he?

Conor snuffles awake. “Is Luke home yet?”

“Not yet,” Stiles says, ignoring the jolt of pain that isn’t just his ribs. “Conor, can you look at something for me?”

Conor nods sleepily and climbs to his feet. He follows Stiles out into the hallway. “Tata, when will Luke be home?”

“Soon,” Stiles tells him, looking into the dining room, and at the map spread out on the table. “Do you think you can help us find him, Conor?”

Conor frowns.

Stiles takes his hand and draws him into the dining room, to the table. He’s aware that Derek’s followed them and is watching from the doorway. Stiles doesn’t look at him. He doesn’t need Derek to tell him why this might not be a good idea, and why it might not even work. Worse, he doesn’t need to see the hope in Derek’s eyes if it’s going to be dashed in seconds.

Conor blinks at the map.

“Where is Luke?” Stiles asks him softly.

Conor draws a breath, and wrinkles his nose. Then he scratches his head. And then, as Stiles’s chest tightens, he raises his hand and shows Stiles the tiny, dancing sparks in his palm. He holds his hand over the map, and they drip like glimmering particles of sand onto the paper. They form a circle, spinning, tightening, until they burst like a corona over one tiny point on the map.

“There, Tata,” Conor says. “Luke is _there_.”


	5. Chapter 5

_There_ is a disused sawmill on the northern edge of the Preserve. The only way in, and out, is a fire trail. That’s good. There’s not much chance of some innocent bystander stumbling across them.

“Let’s kit up,” Stiles says, looking across the room at Derek. “We’ll go as soon as we can.”

He would have said “attack at dawn” but that’s just too fucking cliché. And dawn is way too many hours away. While stumbling around a strange place in the darkness is not going to give him any advantage at all over a bunch of alpha wolves, Stiles can afford to be a bit fatalistic about it. They’re alpha fucking werewolves. What difference will it make? Stiles never had an advantage to begin with.

He runs his fingers through Conor’s scruffy hair and then tries to tell himself that this is just like any other fight. He pushes his thoughts away from Luke, because if he thinks of him now, imagines him crying and scared, he’ll probably crumble.

He looks at Derek, and can tell he’s not the only one.

They head back to join the pack in the living room.

Deaton has arrived, and so have John and Jordan.

“An Alpha Pack,” Deaton says. “I thought those were a myth.”

Great. Something’s taken inscrutable Alan Deaton by surprise. That’s never a good sign.

“I hate to say it,” Deaton says, a worried tone creeping into his voice, “but perhaps Peter can tell us more.”

“And maybe he can tell us how he rose from the grave too,” Lydia mutters.

“Yes,” Deaton says. “That would certainly be worth hearing.”

Scott and Boyd go and fetch him.

Peter emerges from the basement looking as smug as always. He really does have a very punchable face. Stiles tries to concentrate on that, rather than on the frisson of fear that runs down his spine instead. He can still smell Lydia’s blood on the cool night air when he looks at Peter. Can still taste the bitter panic he almost choked on that night. Nothing more clearly marks the line between Stiles’s former life, the one where he was a relatively happy and completely oblivious teenager, and this one, than the nightmare that is Peter Hale.

He glances across the room to Lydia. She’s sitting on the arm of the armchair Jordan’s in. She’s holding his hand. And Jordan is staring daggers at Peter.

“The Alpha Pack is a pack formed entirely with alpha wolves,” Peter announces. His gaze lands on Derek, and then Scott. “Something most people don’t believe in because of the inherent power struggles, but I have a feeling this pack won’t be so hard to convince.”

The Hale-McCall pack has two alphas. It’s a thing. It’s not supposed to be a thing. Alphas are supposed to be like the Highlander or something—there can be only one. Except that’s an incredibly stupid idea, and Stiles was having nothing to do with it. He was not going to choose between his mate and his best friend, okay? Not in a million years. So Derek and Scott found a way to make it work, because Stiles told them they had to. For something that was allegedly impossible, it was also incredibly simple, because, alphas or not, neither of them could out-stubborn Stiles, even if they’d wanted to.

Stiles has a feeling that there is a very different dynamic in the Alpha Pack.

“To join the Alpha Pack, you need to kill your betas,” Peter says. “It’s partly to gain power, partly to sever all your old pack ties, but mostly, I suspect, to prove that you’re bloodthirsty enough to do it. One of Deucalion’s alphas is called Ennis. He did it. Killed his entire pack, except his mate got away. Smart girl. She was very badly injured, but she still managed to escape. And she took her baby with her.” Peter’s gaze falls on the photograph of the kids on the mantle above the fireplace. “Ennis has been searching for the boy ever since.”

“To kill him like the others?” Stiles asks, his voice cracking.

“I don’t know, Stiles,” Peter says, his tone tempered with something that might almost be sympathy. “Probably.”

Stiles chews his bottom lip.

“I highly doubt they’ll do it straight away,” Peter says. “If they want this territory, they’ll use him as a hostage first, to draw you into a fight.”

It shouldn’t be much of a consolation, but it is. As long as Luke’s alive, it is.

When they first found Luke, Stiles did his best not to get attached. Every time he kissed Luke and put him down in his crib, he’d told himself it might be the last time. That any minute now, someone could knock at the door looking for their lost packmate. But it’s been three years. Stiles had figured that Luke’s pack was dead and wouldn’t be coming for him.

Turns out he was only half right.

And there is no way in hell that he’s going to leave Luke in the claws of a murderous alpha, father or not.

“Let me come with you,” Peter says. “Let me fight beside you.”

Derek’s eyes flash red.

“Derek.” Peter shows him his palms. “I know you might never accept me as a beta, but you’re still my family. You’re still my pack. And even if you can’t trust that, and I don’t blame you, you can count on the fact that I want the Alpha Pack dead as much as you do. And if you let me fight with you, I will do everything I can to kill them.”

Stiles catches Derek’s gaze, and it tells him what he needs to know.

Peter’s not lying.

 

***

 

“I don’t want you to come,” Derek says.

Stiles stops rooting around in the closet and turns around to face him. “I’m coming.”

Derek nods. “Yeah, I know. Just thought I’d voice my disapproval.”

Stiles almost quirks a smile at that. Instead he turns back to the closet and finally finds what he’s looking for: the first aid kit. He hauls it out, his ribs protesting, and sets it on the end of the bed. He opens it up and pulls out a few Ace bandages.

“Help me with this?”

They didn’t bandage him up at the hospital because they’d actually believed Stiles when he’d promised he’d get bed rest. Suckers.

Derek’s touch is gentle as he tugs Stiles’s shirt off, and Stiles winces when he has to lift his arms. He manages to hold them out from his body as Derek starts to strap his ribs.

“Tighter,” Stiles instructs, hissing as Derek obeys. Stiles feels like Scarlett O’Hara getting laced into her corset. He’s pretty sure his unbroken ribs are ready to snap as well. He might not be able to breathe, but at least he can move now. At least he can swing a bat. “Tighter. _Fuck_.”

“I don’t trust him,” Derek growls.

Stiles turns to face him, and presses a hand against his cheek. “I know. I don’t trust him either. And the whole resurrection thing? Doesn’t make him Jesus, you know? But if he wants to fight the Alpha Pack with us, then we could use the help. Besides, I’d feel better knowing he was where we can keep an eye on him.”

“He wasn’t always mad,” Derek says, voice low. “I mean, you only knew him when he was like that. When he bit Scott. When he killed people. But he wasn’t like that. Before the fire—”

The Hale fire fucked over a lot of lives.

Derek huffs out a breath. “I could probably forgive him for all of it, except Laura.”

“Yeah.” Stiles could too. He understands vengeance. He understands the need to destroy the people who threaten your pack. He’s been there. He’s put a bullet in the head of the woman who threatened Conor when he was a baby. He’d do it again without thinking. He’d do it a thousand times. So yeah, he’s not going to shed a tear for the assholes Peter killed.

But Peter also killed Laura. He wanted her alpha power, so he killed his own niece. And there is nothing in the world that can excuse that. And nothing that can excuse his attack on Lydia.

Stiles shudders.

Peter offered him the bite that night. He’s never told Derek that. Never told anyone. Because then he’d have to explain how he refused, and how Peter heard his heartbeat and called him on the lie.

He was sixteen, okay? He was scared. And the thought of being strong, instead of skinny and weak, had been powerful. But anger leads to hate, and hate leads to the dark side, right? Who says you can’t learn anything from movies?

And Stiles had been so fucking angry that night. Mostly at his own helplessness. The sort of wolf he would have been with Peter as his alpha? It makes him sick to even think about it.

He rolls his shoulders experimentally, then collects the baseball bat he keeps in the top of the closet. It’s got so much wolfsbane oil rubbed into the wood that once, when Derek picked it up after it toppled over, his palm blistered and Stiles felt guilty for hours. Which was as long as it took for Derek to heal. Stiles used to keep it beside the bed, but not after that. Not with little wolves in the house. Frankly, he’s been thinking of getting a gun safe for the thing.

“I’m not going to think about not getting him back,” he says in a low voice.

Derek puts his arms around him from behind. “We’re getting him back, Stiles. And we’re killing anyone who tries to stop us.”

There was probably a time when a declaration like that would have given Stiles pause for thought, but not now. Not when it’s his kids. Not when this is a pack war.

This is Beacon Hills.

This is his _family_.

No prisoners.

 

***

 

The next few hours are taken up with preparations. Parrish heads into town and comes back with a map of the old sawmill, Kevlar vests, and night vision gear. Stiles holds his arms out with difficulty while his dad straps him into a Kevlar vest.

It feels pointless. His throat is still exposed, and most wolves will go for the throat.

“It’s an added layer of protection, kiddo,” John murmurs. “You’re wearing it.”

“You too, yeah?”

His dad curls his hand around the back of his neck. “Yeah, son. Me too.”

There was a time when Stiles would have fought tooth and nail to prevent his dad from coming with them on something like this. Because it’s his _dad_ , okay? Stiles needs his dad to still be okay at the end of whatever battle the pack drags themselves out of. Except Stiles is a dad himself, and it’s unthinkable to him to imagine letting Claudie or Conor or Luke walk into a fight on their own.

Chris Argent arms the humans.

Guns were never Stiles’s weapon of choice as a teenager, because how was he supposed to get one? Now though, he appreciates them a lot more. He likes the weight of his bat in his hand, but a gun? He doesn’t have to get within a few feet of something clawed and fanged to use a gun.

Stiles takes one now, and two spare clips of ammo.

He lets Chris and Derek pore over the map of the sawmill, and seeks out Lydia instead.

“I need you to stay with Claudie and Conor,” he tells her in a low voice. “Not because I think you can't hold your own in a fight. Not because I think you’re weak…”

But because she’s the next person he trusts with his kids, after Derek and his dad.

She nods, her eyes bright. “I know, Stiles.”

Stiles lets out a long breath. “I’ll text you when we get there. If you don’t hear from anyone after that...”

Lydia hugs him. Her hair smells of strawberries. “I know. I’ll get the fuck out of Dodge.”

“Oregon,” Stiles tells her. “The Davis Pack.”

She nods. “Okay.”

They have a good relationship with the Davis Pack, and an ongoing treaty. The alpha, Marion, won’t turn Lydia and the kids away if they need it. Not after Stiles spent so much time at the hospital with her grandson, cheering him up with junk food and video games after his painful sessions learning to walk with his new prosthetic.

“Thanks, Lyds.”

“Don’t call me that.” She pulls back and smiles tightly. “But it’s not going to come to that, Stiles, okay?”

“Okay,” he agrees, ignoring the roiling fear in his stomach and wishing he was still naive enough to believe that for a second. “Okay.”

 

***

 

Stiles counts down the minutes by pacing first, then sitting down and chewing his nails. He glances up when Peter sits down across from him, then looks away again and jiggles his leg.

“You could always just ask me, Stiles,” Peter says after a while, his voice low, the corners of his mouth turning up in a smile. His eyes shine as though he’s laughing at a private joke. Some things never change, apparently.

Stiles fiddles with his thigh holster, and wishes he felt half as badass as he looks.

The atmosphere in the house is quiet and tense as everyone kits up. Well, as the humans kit up. The wolves are ready to go. Stiles has looked at the map of the sawmill so many times that he can see it burned into his retinas when he closes his eyes. He checks for his firearms and ammo every thirty seconds. When he’s not checking them, he’s fiddling with the thigh holster, and the grip of the knife strapped there.

Peter leans forward a little in his seat. That small movement catches the sharp attention of Scott and Liam, who are currently on zombiewolf watch.

Peter’s gaze slides over them and then shifts back to Stiles, and he raises his brows questioningly.

Yeah, he hasn’t changed a bit, really. He’s still got that super villain need to smugly monologue about all his nefarious achievements. Except Stiles really doesn’t give a damn right now. He’s held together with Ace bandages, painkillers and the protective bubble of numb shock.

“Not that I’m not curious about your whole non-Jesus resurrection,” Stiles tells Peter, “but I’ve got a little more on my mind right now.”

“Of course.” Peter looks almost shamefaced.

Stiles levers himself up from his seat. He needs to get two of his kids to bed, and then he needs to go and get his third kid back. And kill the motherfuckers who took him in the first place.

“Ten minutes,” Chris Argent says, sticking his head around the door.

Stiles finds Claudie in the dining room, sitting under the table feeding oatmeal cookies to Obi-Wan, the dog. He ushers her gently up the stairs. Derek follows behind, carrying a yawning Conor.

“Can we sleep in your bed, Tata?” Claudie asks, eyes wide.

“Okay.”

Conor squirms as Derek sets him down. “Daddy, is Luke home yet?”

“Not yet, Conor,” Derek tells him, stooping down to kiss his forehead.

“Soon?”

Derek meets Stiles’s gaze. “Soon.”

Derek shakes the comforter out over the kids. He kisses Claudie too, and she hugs him, and clings a little tighter than she usually does.

“Daddy? I can help!”

“Not this time, growly girl,” Derek whispers. “Let us take care of it this time, okay?”

Stiles burns with love for his fierce, brave little girl.

They did something right, him and Derek. After an incredibly shaky start, somehow they got their shit together and raised an amazing daughter.

It hurts to bend down and kiss his kids, but Stiles doesn’t care about that. Everything inside him is screaming that this could be his last chance. He kisses Claudie, and smoothes her hair back. When the hell did she get so big? Surely it was only yesterday she magically appeared on his dad’s porch, a squishy little thing with fat starfish hands, a green onesie, and a single word in her vocabulary:

_“Buh!”_

And Conor. Every day he looks more like a little kid and less like a baby. Stiles can still remember pressing his hands against his belly and feeling Conor kick. Can still remember holding him that first time, almost too weak to do it, bleeding out by the second and too afraid to close his eyes because he needed to hold his son in his fading vision for as long as he could.

He kisses Conor.

Conor gazes up at him, amber eyes wide. “If he guesses, he won’t let you choose.”

“What? Who are you talking about, Conor?”

“The Nemeton won’t be able to help you,” Conor whispers, and wraps his arms around Stiles’s neck. “Dead things can’t help you.”

“Conor?” Fear uncoils in his stomach, sparking through him, prickling his skin.

“Goodnight, Tata.” Conor releases him, yawning, and snuggles up with Claudie.

Yeah, not creepy or weird at all. Stiles would probably have a mild panic attack about it, both the ambiguity of the meaning and the incredibly bad timing, but he’s got a lot more on his plate right now.

He’s got an abducted son to rescue.

He’s got an Alpha Pack to kill.

He’s got a resurrected psychopathic werewolf drinking tea in his living room.

He just needs to make sure everyone who matters survives the night.

He can worry about the Nemeton later.

Provided there is a later.

 


	6. Chapter 6

Each bounce of his dad’s cruiser on the rough back roads of the Preserve makes Stiles hurt in new and interesting ways. He hopes his bandages hold up until they reach the old sawmill. Or the mile before the sawmill, since they’ll be walking in from there. The engines of their cars will just make it too damn easy for the Alpha Pack, otherwise.

Jesus. An entire pack of alphas. The only alpha werewolf Stiles has ever killed, or helped kill, was Peter Hale. And apparently it didn’t take.

“What I don’t understand, Derek,” Peter says from the backseat where he’s flanked by Derek and Boyd, “is why we’re not taking our biggest weapon?”

Stiles winces as they hit another bump.

“It’s not Stiles, is it?” Peter asks. “It’s the boy. The boy is very powerful.”

Great. A few hours in the house and Peter’s already sniffed that out.

“We could use him,” Peter says, and Stiles’s stomach twists.

“He’s _six_ ,” he hisses.

“I don’t see what that—”

“Shut up, Peter,” Derek growls.

Peter shuts up.

The cruiser continues winding into the woods.

 

***

 

Battles are a numbers game, first and foremost. Stiles learned this very early on in life when, in second grade, he was cornered in the playground by a kid called Ben and expected to turn all his lunch money over. Unaccustomed to the feeling of panic welling up in him when Ben grabbed his shirt and twisted so he couldn’t get away, Stiles had fallen back on what he’d known. Batman. What would Batman do? Batman would _fight_.

Except Stiles only had Scott to back him up, and Ben had three other kids, and it was a numbers game that Stiles and Scott had very much lost.

Sitting in the dirt nursing his bruises and his humiliation, Stiles had come to the terrible realization that sometimes it wasn’t enough to have right on your side. Sometimes you also needed an army.

And sometimes you need to fight dirty to win.

He’s never forgotten that.

 

***

 

The old sawmill has been abandoned for years. The Preserve is slowly encroaching on it on all sides, reclaiming the place. Through the green-glow of his night vision goggles, Stiles sees saplings growing from the frame of a half-collapsed shed. He sees vines clinging to a wall, and creeping through a smashed window. He sees a fox, thin as a wisp, darting along the exterior of the sawmill.

First, mountain ash.

Stiles and Deaton circle the sawmill, hopefully as quiet as mice, laying down a thick trail of the ash, using their sparks to hold it in place despite the wind. It takes a long time, and, every foot step he takes, Stiles is sure an enraged alpha will come roaring out of the building with its claws out and its fangs bared.

Thank god for the foxes.

Both Stiles and Deaton stink of fox urine—gross but necessary—and their careful footsteps sound no louder than those of an animal. If the Alpha Pack hears them, and Stiles knows it probably does, it will be easy enough to mistake them for foxes.

It’s hard.

Stiles knows they have to be cautious, have to do this slowly, do it _right_ , but Luke is inside that building, he’s right there, and it takes everything Stiles has not to rush inside to grab him. He knows it’d be the dumbest thing he ever did, but what has logic got to do with anything? Luke is his son, and Stiles needs him _now_.

He forces himself to complete the barrier of mountain ash. He and Deaton leave only a few feet of it open, enough to get their pack inside before they close it again.

It’s risky, but there are enough humans in the pack who can hopefully break the barrier if it becomes necessary. In the meantime they need to contain the Alpha Pack. Like rats in a cage.

So, mountain ash first.

Luke next.

Stiles sets the container of mountain ash down and reaches for the baseball bat Allison hands him. He likes the weight of it in his hands. Always has. He unclips his holster as well, and takes out his gun.

That feels pretty damn solid too.

The moon slips out from behind a cloud, bathing the sagging exterior of the old sawmill in silver light.

The pack steps inside the mountain ash barrier, and Deaton closes it.

Two alphas: Derek and Scott.

Five betas: Isaac, Boyd, Erica, Liam and Peter.

Two hunters: Chris and Allison.

Two sparks: Stiles and Deaton.

One aging cop: John.

And one whatever the hell Parrish is.

It’s a numbers game.

Stiles hopes to hell they have enough.

The moonlight strikes the planes of Derek’s face, and illuminates it while he shifts. Fangs, brow, flashing red eyes. He drops his head back and _roars_.

And then all hell breaks loose.

 

***

 

There are five of them.

Five alphas.

Against everything that Stiles brought to this fight.

Stiles and the Hale-McCall Pack are totally winning this fucking numbers game.

 

***

 

Stiles moves like a goddamn ninja, okay? A ninja with broken ribs, but that’s not the point. Whenever he fights, adrenalin or something takes over, and it all comes down to instinct and muscle memory. Stiles goes from being the guy who’s unable to focus, to being hyper focused, or slipping into this weird Matrix-like zone where shit slows down and Stiles develops tunnel vision. Literal tunnel vision. He fixates on his target like he has Terminator-vision and his whole universe narrows down to that. Stiles loses all spatial awareness, and he was never the most spatially aware guy to begin with. Luckily Derek has his back.

In the flash of fangs and claws, in the clash of bodies meeting, in all that movement and chaos and _too-much-happening_ , Stiles steps and spins his way through with only one goal in mind: Luke.

He can _see_ him.

A terrified little kid in the center of the sawmill floor, dusty cheeks stained with tear tracks. Screaming as the world erupts into violence around him.

Stiles sidesteps a female alpha, hardly noticing her. He brings his bat up reflexively, and cracks her in the face with it. She reels back, roaring. And then her claws catch him on the shoulder, slide right through the Kevlar, and his flesh tears.

Stiles has played this video game a million times, hasn’t he? You enter a room, the door slams shut, and suddenly they’re coming at you from all sides.

He spins, her claws digging in deeper, and pushes the barrel of his handgun against her chest. Her eyes widen, and then he fires. Or maybe the other way around. She hits the floor, howling, and Stiles will worry later about blood loss and sepsis and shit like that. He has to get to Luke.

Behind him, he hears roaring and growling, and shit shattering. Dry wood snapping, or bones, or something. Stiles doesn’t care.

“Luke!” He drops to his knees and flings his arms around his son. Scoops him into his embrace.

“Tata!” Luke wails, little arms wrapping around his neck. “Tata!”

Stiles keeps moving, half staggering to his feet. His ribs are fucking killing him, and Luke’s weight isn’t helping. But fuck his ribs. Stiles would rather die than let go of Luke right now. He hefts Luke to his left side, favouring his right, and makes for the back entrance that he spotted on the map.

Because this is the plan:

Stiles gets his son and gets out, and lets the rest of the cards fall wherever they may.

The plan goes wrong when suddenly some giant wolfed-out alpha leaps from fuck knows where and lands on the floor in front of Stiles. Stiles is pretty sure he feels the floor crack. And the floor is made of concrete.

Stiles twists to hold Luke away from him, and raises his gun and fires.

The alpha wolf doesn’t even flinch. Just roars again and slashes at Stiles with his razor-sharp claws. They snag in the Kevlar but not, fortunately, in Stiles because Stiles is already moving, back toward the frenzied melee in the middle of the floor.

It’s a sawmill. Could the big rusty circular saw be more of a cliché? Stiles has seen enough horror movies to know to stay the hell away from that, but he dives under the framework of the old conveyer belt just to get some cover. He does an awkward commando crawl as far underneath as he can get, with Luke wedged between him and the floor. Luke whimpers into his throat.

First it was a numbers game, and now it’s a waiting game.

Stiles just needs his pack to kill the Alpha Pack before Scary Alpha manages to tear the conveyer belt apart. Which is what it sounds like he’s trying to do.

“ _Emissary_.” Scary Alpha growls the title out like it’s an obscenity. “Give me back my pup!”

Yeah, right. Stiles will just give the innocent child back to the homicidal asshole who killed all his betas just so he could join the All Alpha Freak Show? Now with added freaks. No. Because Stiles made a promise to Luke the first time he ever picked him up. He promised to look after him, and to keep him safe, and that includes keeping him safe from his biological father. Also, possession is like nine tenths of the law, right?

That shit probably doesn’t fly with custody battles though.

Or werewolves.

Point is, he is _not_ going to let this asshole take Luke. Not after his mother died to get him as far as Beacon Hills, maybe drawn by the power of the Nemeton, like so many supernatural creatures, or maybe drawn by something else. By the rumor of the Hale-McCall Pack, thrown together by fate and held together by friendship. A ragtag bunch of oddballs and hangers-on. Of humans and hunters and wolves, working together to keep their territory safe. If that’s what Luke’s mom wanted for him, if that’s what she died to give him, then no, nobody gets to take that away from him now.

Stiles scrabbles forward as metal screams behind him. Scary Alpha is too big to fit under the conveyer, so he’s just ripping it apart instead.

Stiles needs to get Luke outside. Deaton is watching the mountain ash barrier. If Stiles can get Luke there, Deaton can open the barrier to get him through. He’ll be safe there.

Except Stiles is heading in the wrong direction for both exits. He’s heading for a wall.

He hits it, and hunkers there. He sandwiches Luke between the wall and his body.

Feels a strip of metal scrape against his back as Scary Alpha tears the conveyer apart behind him.

“Luke,” he whispers. “Luke, you gotta run, okay? You gotta run to Daddy.”

Luke wails and holds him tighter.

Shit.

_Shit shit shit._

“Derek!” Stiles screams. “ _Derek!_ ”

There’s a massive crash directly behind him. Stiles twists his head in time to see Erica bringing Scary Alpha down in a tackle. She’s all teeth and claws, and Scary Alpha bats her off like an insect. She hits the floor, bones cracking.

Chris Argent, his face covered in a mask of blood, advances on Scary Alpha, a gun in each hand, firing. Scary Alpha jerks as each bullet hits him, and maybe he’s actually getting weaker? Please, Jesus, let him be getting weaker.

And then Derek is there as well, and Stiles hardly has time to cover Luke’s eyes before Derek grabs Scary Alpha’s throat, and rips it out.

Stiles cops a face full of his blood, like hot rain.

It’s silent then, or his ears are ringing…no, it’s silent.

Is it over? Did they win?

Stiles can’t actually get up. His ribs are jabbing into him whenever he tries to breathe, and he doesn’t think his legs will work. But then Derek is helping him to his feet, and he’s covered in blood and gore and Stiles doesn’t even care, because they _won_.

The sawmill looks more like a slaughterhouse floor.

Boyd is crouching over Erica, helping her sit. Isaac’s arm is hanging from a few sinews, which _gross_ , but Scott is holding it in place while the flesh and muscles and bones slowly knit. Allison is gripping Isaac’s good hand tightly. Blood is dripping down her face from a cut above her eye.

Liam is standing in the middle of the carnage looking shell-shocked. As Stiles watches, Parrish puts a hand on his shoulder and says something in a low tone. Stiles can’t hear it, but Liam nods and closes his eyes.

And Stiles’s dad… John is crouched over the body of an alpha, covered in blood, and Stiles’s breath catches in his throat. “Dad?”

“I’m okay, kiddo,” John says. “Nothing a few stiches won’t fix.”

“Okay,” Stiles echoes, relief flooding through him. “Are we all okay?”

Peter Hale nudges the body of one of the alphas with the toe of his boot. “I’d say that went very well indeed. Derek?”

Derek grunts. His chest and rising and falling rapidly. He’s close to collapsing, Stiles figures. His shirt is shredded, and Stiles can see blood and bone underneath. It’s not healing. Why isn’t it healing?

“Alphas,” Derek says. “It’ll take longer. Scott, you’ll need to bandage Isaac up so he doesn’t bleed out before he heals.”

“You too,” Stiles says. “You too, Der.”

“Deaton’s on his way,” Chris tells them.

Stiles nods, and kisses the top of Luke’s head.

It’s okay.

Everyone’s going to be okay.

 

***

 

Stiles calls Lydia to tell her everyone’s going to be fine and that they’re coming home.

Chris and Boyd and Liam bring the convoy of cars to the sawmill.

Stiles holds Luke while Chris and Scott load Isaac into Chris’s SUV and head off toward town. Deaton wants to stitch Isaac’s arm and monitor him overnight. Allison goes with them.

Boyd and Erica and Liam take Erica’s car and head back toward the house.

Parrish and John walk through the carnage in the sawmill and discuss in low tones how to make the bodies disappear.

Stiles goes and sits in the front seat of his dad’s cruiser, legs extended out the open door, and murmurs nonsense to Luke until he falls asleep in the back seat. Stiles is bone weary, and he can’t stop shaking. He doesn’t think he’ll ever get the taste of blood out of his mouth.

Derek and Peter approach the cruiser. Derek is moving slowly. He’s still hurting. His shoulders are hunched over and he’s a little off balance. Peter reaches out an arm to steady him.

It happens so fast that Stiles doesn’t even know what he’s seeing until it’s too late.

It’s not to steady him.

It’s not.

Stiles’s blood turns to ice.

“Der—” He doesn’t even get Derek’s full name out before Peter has casually torn Derek’s throat out. Derek hits the ground, choking. He twitches once or twice like a landed fish, and then he doesn’t move.

He can’t be—

Stiles’s brain takes too long to catch up.

Peter’s eyes flash red.

 _Derek_.

“Well then,” Peter says, suddenly at the cruiser, his bloody hand wrapped around Stiles’s throat. Claws dig in. “I wanted a pack. I think I’ll take this one.”

Stiles doesn’t even have time to scream as Peter’s claws sink in and he rips his trachea out.


	7. Chapter 7

Wood cracks against wood, inches above Stiles’s face.

Stiles’s eyes snap open.

He’s awake.

Gasping for breath, his hand clutching his throat, and he’s awake. The sunlight is blinding him. The left side of his face is pressed against grass, and everything smells a little like bengay. And from somewhere close by, people are yelling at him.

He blinks, and then he’s somewhere else.

He is standing in a dark place, while around him a soft green light gently softens the blackness. Stiles looks down. He’s standing on the cracked surface of the Nemeton. The green light is spilling from the cracks like mist. There’s a little boy sitting cross-legged on the massive trunk. He has eyes the color of resin.

Stiles opens his mouth to ask where he is, but the sound he makes is like the wind rustling through the leaves.

Conor opens his mouth too, and his words are birdsong.

Stiles doesn’t understand.

Then Conor reaches out and touches his foot, and a switch in Stiles’s brain flips, and the language of the Nemeton becomes words:

_Tata, you’re safe._

“Bilinski?”

Stiles opens his eyes and squints up at the silhouette of the man leaning down over him. “Coach?” he rasps, his fingers still wrapped protectively around his throat, and he’s crying, he’s crying because any second now he’ll feel that pain again, feel the blood gushing through his fingers, but not dying fast enough because he can feel the loss of _everything_ before his own life is ended.

His eyelids flicker shut, and the world is dark and cool and green again, and Conor’s voice sounds like the crack and trickle of melting ice on the creek in spring.

_Tata, if he guesses, he won’t let you choose._

The shrill screech of a whistle forces his eyes open again.

“Bilisnki! Jeez, who hit Bilinski in the head?”

“Conor?” Stiles asks, his voice rasping, and how can he talk if he has no throat? How can he talk if he’s dead? How can any of this be real? He’s in hell, obviously. He was a terrible human being and now he’s in hell because hell is obviously fucking high school. Specifically lacrosse practice. “ _Luke_.”

Luke was in the back seat.

Coach Finstock shoves two fingers in front of him. “Bilinksi, how many fingers am I holding up?”

“Where…” Nothing here makes sense. Derek. Oh god. Derek too. “Where are my kids?”

Finstock’s eyes bulge out of his skull. “You’re delirious, Bilinksi. Or concussed. What the hell would I know? I’m not a doctor. I don’t trust them. But I’d bet my remaining testicle that you’re concussed.”

Stiles blinks again, and this time it doesn’t take him to the Nemeton, to Conor.

He sits up carefully.

He’s wearing his lacrosse uniform. And yeah, the team is gathering around him pointing and laughing. And what the fuck is going on here?

Scott elbows his way between Danny and Greenberg. He looks so _young_. Floppy-haired and puppy-dog eyed.

“I’ll take him to the nurse, Coach.”

“Fine.” Finstock straightens up again and blasts his whistle. “Suicide runs, let’s go!”

“Stiles?” Scott asks. “Are you okay?”

Stiles swallows, and tastes blood. Blinks, and sees Derek fall as Peter rips his throat out. Feels claws in his own throat. Feels his flesh tearing. Feels Peter killing him.

He squeezes his eyes shut and bites his lip, and nothing here is real, and he’s going legitimately crazy, but he saw Derek die. He saw it. And where are his kids? What happened to his kids?

He’s starting to hyperventilate. He’s skirting very close to the edge of a panic attack.

“Stiles?” Scott asks again, putting a hand on Stiles’s shoulder. His voice is low with worry.

Stiles forces his eyes open again. He tugs his lacrosse jersey up and inspects his frame. He’s skinnier than he has been since he became an adult. Okay, so not exactly scrawny as hell, but skinnier than he can remember ever being. This is his body before years of training for lacrosse. His body before his last growth spurt. His body before he started running with wolves.

His pale skin is unmarked by any scars.

Jesus fuck. What is he? Fifteen? Sixteen?

“Stiles?” Scott grips his shoulder tighter. “Dude, you’re crying.”

“What happened?” Stiles whispers.

Scott scowls. “Jackson tripped you. Bro, he’s just pissed that Lydia agreed to go to the formal with you.”

What? _What?_

“Fuck. Help me up?”

Scott hauls him to his feet. “We should go to the hospital, maybe? Mom’s working. She can check you out.”

“I’m not concussed.”

Scott looks dubious.

“I’m maybe having a total mental breakdown, but I’m not concussed.” Stiles draws a breath. “Just. Just I have to go and see Deaton and —”

“Deaton? I thought you said he was the alpha?”

Fuck, _what_?

Stiles scrubs his knuckles over his buzzcut. Right, of course, because for a very short time there he’d totally mistrusted Alan Deaton and his knows-more-than-he’s-saying bullshit. Which, to be fair to Deaton, Stiles can’t blame him for. _Oh look, some confused and panicking reactionary teenagers. I must immediately bring them into the circle of trust._

Also, he’s got a timestamp on this thing now, right?

If they’re at the point where Stiles thinks Deaton is the alpha, then obviously Scott is already a wolf, Peter is allegedly in a coma, and this is Stiles’s sophomore year in high school all over again. Which means that Derek—

Stiles sees Derek fall. Sees him die.

Which means that Derek…

Stiles turns around and looks toward the trees at the edge of the field.

His heart skips a beat when he sees him. Derek Hale, standing there watching, with his scowl and his black leather jacket.

“Derek,” he whispers, and Derek’s sharp hearing picks up on the word, and his even sharper gaze cuts toward Stiles. “Oh, fuck.”

Derek turns and vanishes into the trees.

For a second Stiles doesn’t know what’s worse. The fact that only moments ago he saw Derek die, or the fact that Derek is here, now, and Stiles is nothing to him.

 

***

 

The locker room is empty.

Stiles stands in front of a sink and stares into the mirror.

A buzzcut.

A pale face with dark circles under the eyes.

He looks _young_.

Stiles twists on the tap, and cups his shaking hands under the stream of water. He splashes some on his too-young face, and then wipes his hands on his shorts.

Whatever’s going on here, it’s down to Conor.

 _Conor_.

Thinking of his kids chills Stiles to the bone. Not just the thought that they don’t exist in this place, in this time, but the thought that if Stiles can’t find his way back, maybe he’ll never see them again. Also, if he does the wrong thing here, if he doesn’t let it play out exactly the way it always did, will his kids even exist anymore?

But if they don’t exist anymore, then how could this all be possible? A non-existent Conor can’t do magic, right?

Fucking magic.

Fucking time travel.

This shit is too complicated to get a handle on.

And isn’t there that whole thing about going back in time and stepping on an insect and suddenly the entire future is changed? Stiles’s kids belong to that future, and he needs to get back to them.

Except in that future Stiles is already dead.

Jesus. He can’t…

A million tabs open in his brain thanks to his ADHD, and he can’t fucking find a single one that helps.

“Scott?”

“Yeah?”

“I need to see Deaton. I need to see him.”

“Okay,” Scott says, face serious, and this is what Stiles has always loved about Scott. Scott trusts him. He doesn’t need to explain. Which is lucky, because he’s not sure he can. But Scott trusts him anyway, and he always has. “Okay, let’s go and see Deaton.”

 

***

 

The Beacon Hills Animal Hospital is closed when they get there, but Scott has a key. Alan Deaton appears from out the back when the bells on the door jangle.

“Scott,” he says with a smile. “You’re early.”

“Um,” Scott says and looks worriedly at Stiles.

See, the thing is that most of Stiles’s memories from this time are a jumbled mess. And some of them have completely vanished, because repression is good for the soul, and Stiles can’t exactly remember how much Deaton knows at this point, or how much Stiles knows he knows. And it’s so strange to try to divorce himself from every feeling of relief washing over him in this moment because here’s someone who can help him, and to try to remember that even if Deaton isn’t a stranger to him, then Stiles is almost certainly a stranger to Deaton. Because at this point in his life, who was Stiles except Scott McCall’s weird excitable friend?

And while that’s still true ten years from now, Stiles is also a lot of other things as well.

“Wait outside, Scotty, okay?” he tells Scott. “Go sit in the Jeep with the radio on. I don’t want your wolfy ears to pick this up.”

A look of betrayal crosses Scott’s face, and Stiles realizes that Scott’s trust is not unconditional after all. But he nods, and heads outside.

“Right,” Stiles says, rubbing his knuckles over his scalp. “Yeah, wolfy hearing, I said it. I know it and you know it, so let’s not beat around the bush.”

Deaton raises his eyebrows, which is as close as he ever gets to looking surprised as fuck.

Stiles draws a deep breath. “Ten years from now, a werewolf rips my throat out. Except, magically, I’m sent back to here, to _now_. And I could really use some advice, because if I kill that werewolf here, will it totally screw up the timeline and destroy the future?”

“You’ve been watching too many sci-fi movies,” Deaton says mildly.

“I’m totally serious, Alan.”

“I know you are,” Deaton says. “I meant your idea that time is so rigidly linear has obviously been influenced by Hollywood.”

“What is it then?”

“Stronger than you think,” Deaton says. “More adaptive. Organic. Time is like a sapling in a thick rainforest. It might have to make a few twists and bends along the way, but it will always still grow toward the light.”

“It’s always about fucking trees somehow, isn’t it?” Stiles mutters. He huffs at Deaton’s blank look. “Uh, the Nemeton?”

Deaton’s gaze sharpens. “What do you know about the Nemeton?”

“I’m pretty sure it was the Nemeton’s magic that brought me back here.”

“That’s impossible,” Deaton tells him. “The Nemeton is dead.”

Shit.

 _The Nemeton won’t be able to help you. Dead things can’t help you_.

Stiles tries to believe that Conor wouldn’t have sent him here without giving him some means to make it back. Except Conor is also six, and last week he managed to wedge himself headfirst in a hollow log, and Derek had to talk him out of panicking while he carefully shredded the trunk to get him out. Exit strategies are not Conor’s strongest point.

“Okay,” he says, taking a breath. “Okay, so I’ll add that to the list of bridges to worry about crossing when I get to them. In the meantime, what do you know about resurrection?”

“Resurrection?”

“I don’t know how much I should tell you without risking screwing up the timeline.”

“The _adaptive_ timeline,” Deaton reminds him, but doesn’t push. “Tell me only what I need to know, Stiles.”

“The wolf,” Stiles says. “The alpha. We kill him, and we bury him, but he comes back. I need to make sure that this time he can’t do that.”

“Do you know how he comes back?”

“No. I really wish I’d asked that right about now.”

“I’ll research it,” Deaton tells him. “How long do I have?”

Stiles realizes he has no idea. “Um, do you know when winter formal is?”

“Friday,” Deaton says, with the hint of a smile. “Scott won’t stop talking about it.”

“Right,” Stiles says, thinking back. “Because he’s not supposed to go because of his grades, and it’s the end of the world.” He rolls his eyes. “And what day is it now?”

“Wednesday.”

“Then you have two days to tell me how to kill the alpha and make sure he can’t come back.”

Deaton’s smile fades. “Stiles?”

“Yeah?”

“I’m taking a lot on trust here.”

“I know. I know you are.” Stiles winces. “For what it’s worth, thanks. And I know the thanks of some random fifteen-year-old kid you barely know isn’t worth much, but from where I’m standing you’re not just the town vet, or Scott’s boss, or the guy I was recently convinced was the alpha—”

There’s Deaton’s surprised eyebrow raise again.

“You’re the Jedi to my Padawan, dude.”

Deaton looks him up and down, and Stiles has the impression that Deaton is seeing more of him than exists in this moment in time. That somehow Deaton is seeing his potential, and that he approves of what he’s looking at. That Stiles might be a flailing kid in a stinky lacrosse uniform, with wide eyes and a terrible haircut, but that despite all of that, at the core of him there’s something much, much more than that. There’s a spark, and this might be the first time Deaton has really seen it.

“I’ll send you everything I find out by Friday,” Deaton says. “Good luck, Stiles.”

“Thanks.”

 

***

 

Scott is ridiculously easy to distract. Stiles had almost forgotten how simple it was. Because Scott wants to know what’s going with Stiles, and how is Deaton involved, and is Deaton the alpha? And all Stiles has to do is ask him about Allison, and Scott is totally derailed.

She’s his sunshine.

He loves the smell of her hair.

And her dimples. He loves her dimples most of all.

And she’s also really smart, but it’s really complicated, yeah?

Because her family are hunters, and Scott is a wolf, and how is that going to work out if she finds out?

And also, he’s totally going to sneak into the winter formal to see her, even though they’re just friends right now and not actually dating.

But she’s the one, dude, she’s the _one_.

It might be the closest Stiles has come to actually laughing since he got here.

“What?” Scott asks as they head back to school so he can get his motorbike.

“Nothing,” Stiles says. “Hey, Isaac was pretty good at practice today, right?”

“Who?” Scott asks.

“Isaac Lahey,” Stiles says. “You know.”

“Oh, yeah.” Scott shrugs. “I guess he was okay.”

One day, maybe a few years from now, Scott is going to look at Isaac and see that maybe he’s something more than just okay. He’s going to look at Isaac and realize that Allison isn’t his one. Scott’s going to look at Isaac and realize that he has _two_.

Stiles pulls the Jeep to a shuddering stop in the school parking lot.

Scott opens the creaky passenger door. “Hey, Stiles?”

“What?”

Scott frowns. “It’s, um, it’s all going to be okay, right?”

“Yeah,” Stiles tells him. “Everything’s gonna work out.”

Scott nods. “I hope so, bro. I really hope so.”

Stiles doesn’t think they’re talking about Allison anymore, but he keeps his smile plastered to his face as Scott lopes over toward where he’s parked his bike. Then he shifts the Jeep into gear and heads for the hospital.

Two days until the winter prom.

Two days until they kill Peter Hale.

And this time, Stiles is going to make sure it sticks.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My posting schedule is changing a little bit after this chapter. Instead of posting at around 10 pm Australian time, I'll be switching to about 6 am Australian time, because I'm going on to night work for the next three days. So this chapter is a little early, then there will be a slightly longer break than normal after it. I was going to have the slightly longer break before this chapter, but that would have been cruel after a cliffhanger like the last one. 
> 
> I mean, I totally thought about it though... 
> 
> And hopefully I can still write a chapter a day. All that earlier talk of prioritising like an adult was probably just wishful thinking. It turns out that when I'm writing Sterek, that becomes my only priority. 
> 
> To my editor: Yeah, something came up, so that manuscript I owe you is going to be a little late...


	8. Chapter 8

For the record, Stiles doesn’t like déjà vu. He also doesn’t like roller coasters. They’re not usually related, except it turns out they both produce the same sick feeling in his stomach. And right now Stiles feels like he’s strapped into the cart of a roller coaster he really doesn’t want to be on, and they’re just about to reach the top of the climb. And it’s too late to get off now. Everything has already been set in motion, and all Stiles can do is hold on and try not to vomit.

He pulls into the hospital parking lot. It takes a long time before he can get out of the Jeep.

He almost wishes he didn’t know what was coming next, and while he can’t remember the specificities, he remembers the big stuff. He remembers the bodies.

He walks inside the hospital.

When his phone starts to ring—some ridiculous pop song that Stiles can’t even place let alone remember liking so much that at one time he made it his ringtone—he doesn’t even have to look at it to know who’s calling.

“Hey, Derek.”

He wonders if it takes Derek a while to start talking because he’s trying to figure out why Stiles’s heart just missed a beat.

“Stiles. Have you checked Melissa’s workstation?”

Right.

Stiles remembers this. He remembers coming to the hospital. He remembers the nightmare. But the details had sort of escaped him. Something about a text message sent to Scott that was supposed to be from Allison, but wasn’t? And it came from a computer at the hospital.

“She’s not there,” he says, avoiding the question but telling the truth anyway so that his heartbeat won’t skip again. Damn werewolves and their inbuilt lie detectors.

He moves through the halls of the hospital.

He’s numb.

So numb he doesn’t catch what Derek says next.

He has a role to play here. He has to play fifteen-year-old Stiles Stilinski, too hyped up on the excitement of something actually happening in his dull small-town life that tonight, when it all becomes very real, or on Friday night, when he thinks he’s going to die, his reactions will be genuine. Because it needs to play out the way that it did the first time, and if Stiles acts differently then it might have a ripple effect on what everyone else does. This is a nightmare, but this way, at least, they put Peter Hale in the ground. And this time Stiles is going to figure out a way to make him stay there.

He has to follow the script, even though he wants to tear it into a million pieces.

Derek is his _everything_.

But not now.

Not yet.

“Look, ask for Jennifer,” Derek says. “She’s been looking after my uncle.”

Stiles steps into Peter’s hospital room. Nothing but an empty bed. “Yeah, well he’s not here either.”

“What?”

“He’s not here. He’s gone, Derek.”

Did he feel a chill the first time? Or was he just confused like Derek sounds right now?

He waits for the penny to drop.

“Stiles, get out of there right now!” Derek yells down the phone. “It’s him! He’s the alpha! Get out!”

Yeah, there it is.

There it is, and this is how it goes.

 

***

 

“You must be Stiles.”

Peter smiles through the mask of scars that make up half his face.

Stiles doesn’t have to fake his fear. A part of him has always carried it around, maybe, a sealed little vial of _Peter-Hale-is-the-alpha_ terror, ready to smash open to use in an emergency. Fear isn’t rational. Shit, Stiles knows exactly how this is going to go down, and he’s still terrified.

Peter advances on him. All predator. 

“Stiles!”

Stiles hits the floor when Derek appears, and curls up like a hedgehog next to the body of Jennifer, Peter’s nurse. Well, ex-nurse. Above him, Derek roars and launches himself at Peter, into a fight he has to know he can't win. 

Except this time Stiles sees now things he never saw back then.

He sees Derek so young, so vulnerable, and trying so desperately to do the right thing, but not really knowing what that is. Peter is pack, and family, and Derek is so alone. More alone than Stiles can even imagine. He’s a beta who craves an alpha. He’s a lost soul who craves a family more than anything, and Stiles’s heart breaks when he sees exactly why Derek is going to capitulate.

He wants to yell at him to be stronger, to be better, to just _wait_ and he can have all those things again. He doesn’t need Peter. He can have Claudie and Conor and Luke. He can have _Stiles_. He can have a pack. He can have people who will love him again, if only he waits.

But Stiles can’t say anything like that at all.

He can only run, because that’s what he did the first time.

 

***

 

His dad’s house is in darkness when Stiles gets there. How did Stiles ever think that coming home to an empty house was normal, was okay? He showers and changes and then heads to the kitchen to make himself something to eat. The kitchen looks almost the same, except there are no photos of the kids stuck to the fridge. Just white space where Claudie and Conor and Luke should be, and suddenly Stiles isn’t hungry anymore.

He sits on the couch in the living room instead, and stares at his left hand where his wedding band should be. It’s not fair to feel grief for losing things that haven’t happened yet, but when was life in Beacon Hills fair? Ask the Hales.

He just…

He's overwhelmed. He doesn’t know how to be fifteen anymore. He’s pretty sure the general consensus is that he never actually matured much beyond that, but that’s an unfair assessment. He has a job. He pays bills. He sometimes even remembers to sort the recyclables from the rest of the trash. Okay, so mostly he’s still a teenager at heart, but he’s also so much more than that. He’s also a husband and a father, and there has never been a single moment when he regretted either of those things, and now… Now he’s empty, trying to fathom the weight of a loss he can’t tell a soul about, and he keeps seeing Derek _die_ and that cannot be his future. Conor wouldn’t have sent him to this point in time unless there was something he could do to change what happened at the sawmill.

Stiles just has to hold it all together until Friday night, when they kill Peter Hale.

It’s forty-eight hours.

Forty-eight hours is nothing.

But Stiles has never felt as lonely before in his life.

 

***

 

He falls asleep on the couch, and doesn’t even realize it until he jerks awake in the middle of the night, fear snapping at him. He climbs the stairs to his old bedroom, flicks the light on, kicks his shoes off, and lies on the bed.

There’s a dirty sock hanging from the lampshade, and, on the desk opposite the bed, his laptop is open. There’s a half empty bottle of soda beside it. He was a slob when he was fifteen, apparently, but the past eight years of marriage have more or less trained him out of it. Well, Derek trained him out of it, with a series of passive-aggressive sighs and eye rolls whenever he had to pick up yet another wet towel off the bathroom floor. For someone who was living in the burned out remains of his family home when Stiles met him, it turns out that Derek likes to keep things neat and tidy.

Stiles rubs his hand over his face.

He doesn’t want to think about Derek. Not about the Derek he’s lost, and the Derek here who doesn’t even know him. Not really. All Stiles is to Derek is an annoying blip on his radar, and that won’t change until Claudie magically appears on Stiles’s porch and he and Derek are forced to spend time together with their daughter from an alternate reality. It was Claudie who broke down the barriers between them. Claudie who made then see that they could fit together somehow.

God. If Stiles can’t change the future, what happens to Claudie? Does she become Peter’s beta? Does Peter even manage to kill Scott, the second alpha, and truly take the pack for himself? Will Claudie and Luke grow up with their memories of Daddy and Tata forever tainted with horror thanks to the way they died? And what about Conor? Peter knew how powerful Conor was. Will Peter try and use Conor as his own personal magical supply? Or will Conor resist that? Is Conor even old enough to resist that? Would he be able to defend himself if Peter tried to hurt him? Stiles knows so very, very little about Conor’s magic, apart from the fact that Conor is powerful beyond his comprehension. Exhibit A: time travel. But he and Derek tried so hard to give Conor a normal childhood. To give him a chance to figure out _who_ he was before _what_ he was. Stiles doubts Peter would be as concerned for Conor’s wellbeing.

“Derek, no listen!” Stiles had said one night when Conor was still a baby, lugging his wailing son around and around the living room to try to get him to sleep. “It’s like we’re a family of penguins, right? Are you with me?”

“Penguins?” Dubiouswolf.

“Totally. And somehow we accidentally hatched a seagull.” Conor was certainly squawking like one. “And we can feed him all the fish in the world, but how are we supposed to teach him to fly?”

Derek’s eyebrows were totally judging Stiles in that moment.

“Shut up!”

“I didn’t say anything.”

“Your mouth didn’t, but your eyebrows were screaming at me. It’s a perfectly good analogy, Derek.”

“Is it?” Derek had asked, walking over to Stiles to lift Conor out of his arms. “Are you sure? Or did you and Claudie watch _Happy Feet_ again today?”

“We did watch _Happy Feet_ ,” Stiles confirmed. “Then _Finding Nemo_. Hence the seagulls.”

Derek cradled Conor against his chest, rocking him gently. “Shh shh shh, my little sweetheart.”

Sometimes Derek was a fluffy marshmallow, and seeing it just fucking melted Stiles into a pile of sugary goo.

“But how are we going to teach him to fly, Der?” Stiles had asked in a whisper, now that Conor’s wails had transformed into tiny hiccupping sobs instead.

“I don’t know,” Derek had answered, smiling. “But I do know one thing, Stiles. Between you and me, we’ve got this.”

Stiles has pinned his faith on that for years, and now it’s been ripped away from him. And it’s dumb. They’re not weirdly co-dependent or anything. Stiles can function perfectly well without Derek hovering by his side, thank you very much. But Derek is his cornerstone, and Stiles has built an entire life on that, and now it’s gone and everything has collapsed around him.

He blinks around at his childhood bedroom and wonders if this is how his dad felt when his mom died. It’s impossible to say it hurt John more than Stiles—nothing could have hurt Stiles more—but their grief was different, maybe? It was made of different things, twisted in different ways, maybe. Stiles hadn’t had to fall asleep in a bed that was suddenly too big for one person.

He reaches for his pillow, and hugs it tight, and tries not to think about how he usually falls asleep cuddled up with Derek, listening to his heartbeat.

 

***

 

Thursday morning is overcast.

Stiles wakes up when he hears his dad’s crusier pull up to the front of the house. It’s the old cruiser, of course, the one with a persistent rattle in the engine that took the Department forever to replace. Stiles has spent half his childhood in that cruiser, it feels like. Eating curly fries with his dad—

“Curly fries are a sometimes food, Dad!”

“Shut up, Stiles.”

—and getting paid ten bucks every week to clean out the interior, because his dad hates doing it, and that ten bucks goes straight toward gas money for the Jeep. When he was twelve, Stiles had at least four of the deputies paying for the same service. Every Sunday morning his dad would take him down to the station and let him loose in the parking lot, and he’d emerge an hour or so later forty dollars richer. It was damn good money, actually, and Stiles isn’t sure why they stopped doing it. Probably because his dad started taking on too many extra shifts, and his Sunday mornings were no longer free for Stiles supervision duties. Because Stiles could not actually be trusted alone with the cruisers. Hello, sirens!

Stiles makes Derek do the same with their kids. Every Sunday morning they clean his cruiser. Except it costs Derek twelve dollars instead of ten, because he needs to split it three ways. Claudie is angling for a pay increase to five dollars _each_ , but so far Derek has been holding firm in his refusal. Claudie has tried to get the boys to support her, but Conor doesn’t care as long as he’s got enough money to afford peanut butter cups, and Luke can’t really count properly anyway. 

Stiles climbs off the bed when he hears the front door open and close, and pulls a pair of skinny jeans out of his drawer. No, apparently not skinny jeans, but regular jeans. Stiles pulls them on, then finds a faded t-shirt and a flannel to go over the top of it. He sticks his feet into his ratty old Converse, and heads downstairs to find his dad leaning on the kitchen counter inhaling the steam from a coffee.

“Hey.” Stiles is wary, because he can’t remember how he’s supposed to be with his dad. Stiles’s teenage years were pretty rough, firstly because he was a teenager, and secondly because Beacon Hills. There was a time when he was actively lying to his dad on a daily basis, and John knew it, and thought it was drugs or whatever. Stiles isn’t sure if things are completely dire yet, or if they’re just well on their way to it.

There’s a lot less gray in his dad’s hair here. There’s also a lot less openness in his expression.

So yeah, they’re well on their way.

“Did you get your homework done?”

“Yeah,” Stiles says. It’s probably a lie.

“I’m pulling another double shift tonight,” John tells him. “I’ll make sure there’s some dinner in the fridge for you before I leave, okay?”

“I could just eat at Scott’s?”

John grunts, which Stiles takes as permission.

Stiles grabs an apple from the bowl on the counter. “See you later.”

“See you, kid.”

Stiles heads out.

He sits in his Jeep for a while before starting the ignition.

He hasn’t been to high school in seven years.

He hasn’t really missed it either.

Those people who say high school are the best days of your life? Dirty fucking liars.

Stiles sighs, reverses out of the driveway, and points the Jeep toward the high school.

He’s just marking time until Friday night, right?

How bad could it be?

 


	9. Chapter 9

 

Fucking high school.

Seriously.

It gets off to a bad start when Stiles’s first class is Chemistry. And he’s late, because he had to check his timetable. Which means he had to find his timetable, and it was wedged down the back of his locker between a textbook and an unopened pack of Twizzlers. So when he finally gets there, Harris is pissed off and gives him a detention even before he can come up with an excuse. Like his Jeep broke down. Or his alarm didn’t go off. Or what the fuck ever.

It’s ludicrous.

He made the effort to turn up, and what difference does five minutes make? Stiles’s isn’t a fucking _child_ , and there’s no need for this asshole to treat him like one.

Except he kind of is?

He slumps down into his seat, opens his textbook, and is suddenly confronted with an entire page of words and diagrams that don’t make any sense at all. His smug pleasure at discovering hey, he didn’t use any of this shit in the real world after all so what was the point in learning it, is very quickly swept away when Harris asks him a question: How many neutrons are in potassium-40?

Okay, first of all, what is potassium-40, and secondly, what’s a neutron again?

“Um,” he says, and this actually sucks because he was good at Chemistry back in the day. Meaning the actual day, not this specific day, apparently. He has an idea that he’s supposed to subtract the atomic number from the atomic mass. The atomic mass of potassium-40 is probably forty—the name is a dead giveaway—but he doesn’t know what the atomic number is. He narrows his eyes and takes a random stab at it. “Twelve?”

Even Scott winces.

Harris rolls his eyes. “Useless.”

Wow. Stiles had kind of forgotten what as asshole Harris was. What sort of teacher calls kids useless? If Stiles ever found out one of his kids was called useless by a teacher, he’d be down at the school quick smart, demanding the asshole’s job.

He chews on his pen and stares at the page of his textbook instead.

He’s not here to make waves. Also, Harris dies horribly in about a year, so there’s that.

What?

If Harris wasn’t such a dick, he wouldn’t have got drunk in a bar and told a pretty blonde woman how to make arson look undetectable, just on the off chance he’d get laid.

Pretty much all of Derek’s family died in that fire.

So fuck Harris. Fuck him sideways.

“Problem, Mr. Stilinksi?” Harris smarms when he catches Stiles’s death stare.

“Nope,” Stiles says, while the subtext says _fuck you_.

Harris gives him another detention. Stiles has the feeling he’s really going to start racking those up in Chemistry. Which, come to think of it, is pretty much how sophomore year went the first time.

 

***

 

School tater tots are just as gross as Stiles remembers. Unlike curly fries, they don’t even have the redeeming quality of tastiness. Stiles covers them in ketchup while Scott looks quietly disgusted, and shovels them into his mouth.

“Wha?”

“Are you trying to drown them?” Scott asks.

“This is disgusting,” Stiles tells him, but keep eating anyway. Carb loading. It’s a thing. Werewolves do it all the time. Like before Derek goes on a run he sometimes eats a whole bowl of oatmeal. Just like before he starts a movie marathon, Stiles sometimes eats a whole pizza and then has an emergency nap. It’s totally the same thing.

He ignores Scott’s judgemental stare as he eats, and looks around the cafeteria.

It’s mostly exactly the same he remembers, but it’s weird to see people he hasn’t seen in years, like Danny and Greenberg and Jared. And—holy crap. Erica. Frizzy-haired pallid-skinned Erica, wearing an ugly oversized sweater with the sleeves pulled over her hands. She’s sitting two tables over from Stiles, but Stiles doesn’t think he ever noticed her the first time around.

He catches her gaze, and she buries her face behind a book.

Stiles pushes his remaining tater tots away.

Wow, yeah, high school. Where Erica was the epileptic everyone ignored, until she had a seizure and then they pointed and laughed, where Boyd was invisible, and where Isaac was regularly getting the shit beaten out of him by his dad and nobody noticed. Where even the popular kids like Lydia or Jackson, that complete douchebag, didn’t have it as easy as Stiles had thought at the time.

And speaking of Lydia…

She walks into the cafeteria looking as bored and unimpressed as always. Straight past Jackson as though she can’t even see him, and over toward Stiles. She stands in front of him, holding a few textbooks on her hip, and sighs.

“ _If_ you are taking me to the winter formal,” she announces, “I’m going to need you to send me a picture of the suit you’ll be wearing.”

Stiles drags his fork through his pool of ketchup. “Okay.”

Her gaze flickers toward him, then away again. “Also, I’m only agreeing to do this because I owe Allison.”

“Okay,” he says again, and shrugs.

She narrows her eyes suspiciously, flips her hair and stalks away.

“Dude,” Scott says in a low voice.

“What?”

“You just blew off Lydia Martin!”

“What? No, I didn’t!” Except, okay, maybe he totally did. Maybe he’s not great at navigating the treacherous currents of high school politics anymore, and in any scenario where he’s not actively falling onto his knees to kiss the ground where Lydia walks maybe that’s the same thing as blowing her off? His fifteen-year-old self probably would have thought so, but then his fifteen-year-old self was a total dick when it came to Lydia. “Did I?”

Scott nods.

Stiles shrugs.

“Bro,” Scott says, “What is _wrong_ with you?”

How the hell can Stiles even begin to explain? He’s in a crowded school cafeteria, and half the pack is here too, but the ones who will be wolves aren’t wolves yet, and the girl who will be one of his closest friends probably wouldn’t cross the street to piss on him if he was on fire. Everything feels wrong.

And he can’t stop thinking about Derek, which would be okay, probably, except Stiles knows that there’s no way Derek’s thinking of him in return.

 

***

 

Stiles manages to avoid getting another detention by the end of the day, but it’s a near thing. His English teacher did not appreciate his theory that maybe _Nineteen Eighty-Four_ isn’t just a warning about totalitarianism, but also a satire on modern class structure. Although it probably wasn’t just the theory she objected to, but rather Stiles’s delivery, which had begun with, “Omigod, are you even serious with this typical sophomoric analysis? Orwell was a freaking _genius_. Of course there’s an alternate reading!”

His dad is already at work when Stiles gets home. Stiles makes himself microwave mac and cheese, and eats it leaning against the counter. He’s antsy, just like he’s been all day. He misses his kids. He misses Derek. He doesn’t fit this life anymore, and he doesn’t want to.

He goes upstairs eventually, photographs his suit and sends the picture to Lydia.

She doesn’t reply, so Stiles calls her.

“Hi, Lydia.”

“Who is this?” she asks airily, when of course she knows.

“It’s Stiles,” he tells her. “I wanted to say I was sorry for today at lunch.”

“For what?” she asks.

“For not giving you whatever reaction you were looking for,” he tells her. “Don’t hang up, please. I’m pretty sure I’ve been a creepy stalker to you for a really long time now, and if I’ve made you uncomfortable, I’m sorry for that too.”

He hopes her silence means she’s listening. He forges on.

“For what it’s worth, Jackson is a dick and I will pretty much sing that from the rooftops, but I don’t have any right to tell you who to date, and you don’t have to justify your decisions to anyone, especially me.”

“I know I don’t,” Lydia tells him, and hums. “What happened to you anyway? Did you trip and fall into a big old puddle of feminism on your way home?”

“Hey, can’t a guy turn over a new leaf?”

“We’ll see,” she says, but her tone is less frosty than before. “See you tomorrow, Stiles.”

“Bye.” He ends the call and then texts Deaton: _Anything_?

It’s winter formal tomorrow.

His suit is pressed and ready to go.

By the end of the night it will be covered in blood.

Stiles never did get his deposit back.

 

***

 

There’s a part of Stiles that wants to leap into his Jeep and drive out to the Preserve, down that familiar curving road to where, in this time, the ruins of the old Hale house are still standing.

_He can’t he can’t he can’t…_

It won’t be his Derek waiting for him.

It won’t be his house.

It’s some creepy set out of a horror movie, and Derek is there right now, and Peter probably is, and Scott too? Because everything starts to go to shit now that Peter’s awake again, and some time tonight Allison will watch her Aunt Kate torture Derek with electricity, and how is this Stiles’s life? How was this ever his life?

He sits on his bedroom floor and wraps his arms around his drawn-up legs. He rests his head on his knees and tries to remember how to breathe.

“Goddammit, Conor,” he whispers fiercely. “Come on, kiddo, give me a fucking hint, because I have no idea if I’m supposed to be doing anything!”

Peter Hale dies tomorrow night. Great. So that way he can’t kill Derek and Stiles in the future, right? But if Peter dies tomorrow night and stays dead, who will warn them about the Alpha Pack?

Stiles bumps his forehead against his knees and groans.

Conor’s spell will still find Luke at the sawmill, but they won’t know what they’re walking into. Is that how it will work? There’s no fucking way of knowing, is there? It’s a lot to take on faith, Deaton said yesterday, and Stiles is really starting to get that now.

Jesus Fucking Christ, he needs an Adderall.

He finds a blister pack of pills in his desk drawer and pops one open. Swallows it down with a mouthful of the flat soda that’s sitting on his desk, and almost gags when it catches in his throat.

He thinks of Claudie, when she was five or six, helping him basically tip every drawer in the house out onto the floor because he couldn’t find his Adderall. And yes, he could see the path of destruction he was leaving, thanks very much, and no, he wasn’t a junkie looking for a fix, he just really needed his Adderall, okay, because he brain was sort of scattered at the moment, less laser precision and more buckshot, and he was not crazy. He was definitely not crazy. Definitely not. He might have repeated that last one more than a few times.

“Daddy!” Claudie had yelled when Derek had arrived home. “We’re looking for Tata’s not-crazy brain pills!”

“Not crazy, huh?” Derek had asked, his mouth quirking, and had helped Stiles find his Adderall and then helped him clean up, and had never even bitched about the mess. But it’s not _all_ Saint Derek. Stiles has never put his fist through the wall when he was talking on the phone to an overly aggressive telemarketer. No, he has not. 

He laughs at the memory, and the sound is sharp and ugly. It sounds a lot like desperation. Then he sinks down again with his back against the wall and wraps his arms around his knees. There might be some rocking back and forth involved. That’s how his dad finds him, hours later.

“Stiles? Jesus. Stiles?”

Stiles and John might be slowly falling out of sync in this world, but they’re not quite there, not quite running in counterpoint, in opposition. When John crouches down on the floor in front of him, Stiles leans into him and John lets it happen.

“What’s going on, huh? What’re you sitting here in the dark for?” John sounds concerned. Bewildered too. He rubs a hand up and down Stiles’s back.

“Thought you had a double shift.”

“Snapped a damn bootlace,” John tells him. “They don’t make ’em like they used to, I guess. I thought you were eating at Scott’s.”

“I didn’t feel well,” Stiles mumbles, breathing in the scent of his dad’s body wash and deodorant, and the fabric softener they use. “So I came home.”

“Right,” John says. “And here you are sitting on the floor. You want to tell me what’s really going on? Did you guys have a falling out?”

The only thing Stiles’s has fallen out of is time.

“Nah,” he says. He sits back. “We’re okay. I’m just—I dunno. Just stressed out or something.” He shrugs. “I dunno.”

John’s forehead creases with concern. “You sure, son?”

Stiles forces a smile. “Yeah, Dad. I took my Adderall late, and I forgot it completely yesterday, and I’m just—” He makes an intentionally vague gesture with his hand. “—all over the place.”

“Stiles.” John shakes his head and gives an exasperated sigh. It sounds tempered by fondness. Stiles hopes it is. “We’ve talked about this, son. You remember what the doctor said when he saw you last? You have to get in a routine. Eat right, and get your sleep, and take your Adderall at the same time each day.”

“Yeah,” Stiles croaks. “I remember, Dad.”

“Okay, kiddo,” John says, and Stiles is relieved he’s not going to get the entire lecture this time. It was a recurring theme through his adolescence, and he still remembers it word for word, probably.

“Okay,” he echoes. “Okay.”

 

***

 

He dreams that night of the Nemeton. He dreams he’s walking around it, begging it for help, but he’s crazy because it’s nothing but a dead stump here. It was Conor who woke it, and Conor hasn’t happened. Stiles dreams that he screams at it, demanding his life back, and in a flash of green light it gives him everything he ever wanted.

And time speeds up, in a blur of color and sound, so fast that Stiles is almost overcome with nausea. Images rush past him. He sees Claudie again, and then Conor, and then Luke. He hears laughter. He feels Derek’s arms around him. Melts at the press of Derek’s lips against his.

The Nemeton gives it all back to him, and then, one night at the old sawmill, Peter rips his throat out all over again.


	10. Chapter 10

 

On Friday morning Stiles gets a text message from Deaton: _Remove the head before burning the body._

Gross.

He sends back: _Do I burn the head too? Or just the body?_

Really, this is the sort of text message exchange he hopes will never come up in a court of law.

Deaton sends back: _Both_.

Right. Okay. Stiles can do that. He’ll probably vomit all over the place when he does, but that’ll be a small price to pay for making sure Peter stays dead this time.

He swings by the animal clinic before school and bangs on the door until Deaton opens it.

“Stiles,” Deaton says. “Come in.”

“So,” Stiles says as he follows Deaton out to where he’s feeding the animals. “I might need to borrow a bone saw.”

To his credit, Deaton only nods. “Electrical?”

“No. If it all plays out how it should, this happens in the woods.”

“I’ll see what I can find.”

Stiles inspects a cage of kittens while Deaton goes and looks for a bone saw. They’re very small. Strays, probably. They look way too little to be without a mother, but there’s no cat in with them. They’re not even fuzzy yet. Just kind of wrinkly. Their movements are jerky and new.

Stiles always wanted a cat, but cats, generally speaking, don’t get along with werewolves. He’s been petitioning his dad to get one instead, so he can go and visit it, but apparently John doesn’t think it would be fair to get an animal that would freak out when the kids came over.

And see? This is the life that Stiles needs to get back. He wants to spend his days plotting how to get a fuzzy kitten into his life, instead of how to kill and dismember a homicidal alpha.

“Do all cats hate werewolves?” he asks Deaton when Deaton returns with a bone saw.

Deaton sets the saw on top of the cage of kittens, and considers that for a moment. “I would say most, yes. Not all.”

"Yet you still let Scott work here." 

Deaton smiles slightly. "Well, most cats hate vets too, so." He shrugs. 

Stiles pokes his finger in the cage, and a kitten bumps its head up against it. “I want a cat, but Derek says no.”

Deaton raises his eyebrows, and Stiles realizes he’s given away more than he should have with that comment. But Deaton only inclines his head. “Well, you just need to find the right cat.”

“Right. These guys are cute.”

“They may not survive,” Deaton says. “They’re too small, and went too long without their mother. It’s likely that they’ll be prone to seizures because they were malnourished when they were brought in.”

“Oh.” Stiles pulls his finger out of the cage. “Even though they’re being fed now?”

“The damage may already be done,” Deaton tells him. “But we’ll see.”

Stiles gestures to the latch on the cage. “Can I?”

“Of course.”

Stiles opens the cage and reaches in for a kitten. He carefully lifts out the first one he touches, a squirmy little brown and gray tabby, and cradles it against his chest. It weighs next to nothing. Its spine is as jagged as a bandsaw. “So the thing with time travel…”

Deaton looks at him expectantly.

“So when the alpha comes back in the future, he tells us something pretty damn important. Something necessary. And I’m worried that if he doesn’t come back and tell us that thing, then someone else is in real danger.”

“More danger than you?”

Stiles rubs a finger gently down the kitten’s back, and thinks of Luke and the Alpha Pack. “The exact same danger, I guess, but he’s more important than me.” The kitten opens its mouth in a silent meow. “So how do I make sure we still have a way to get that information?”

“You tell someone you trust,” Deaton says. “Someone you know will be there. It’s very possible that you’ll remember it yourself, but if it would ease your fear then—”

“The Alpha Pack,” Stiles blurts out before Deaton can even finish. “Luke is taken by the Alpha Pack!”

He feels strangely light-headed just by saying it, as though the past and the future are meeting and they know they’re not supposed to. Like a weird shift in the air before a change in weather, or the unnatural stillness in the world that precedes an earthquake.

Deaton puts a hand on his shoulder. “I’ll remember that,” he says. “Even if you don’t.”

Stiles’s hands are shaking, so he puts the kitten back in the cage. “Thank you. It’s important. Thank you.”

Because if anyone is inscrutable and cryptic enough to hold onto a secret like that until it’s the right time to divulge it, of course it’s Alan Deaton.

“Good luck for tonight,” Deaton tells him.

Stiles picks up the bone saw. “Thanks.”

 

***

 

He drives out toward the Hale house, and stops a mile or so before he gets there. Stashes the bone saw in a hollow trunk a little way off the road, then gets the hell out again before anyone knows he’s there.

 

***

The entire school is buzzing with excitement, because it’s the winter formal tonight. It’s like nobody can possibly concentrate on their classes because the promise of warm punch and awkward social interaction is too much for them. Stiles tries to remember that he felt that way too, the first time around, because he was going to the formal with Lydia Martin, and he worshipped the ground she walked on. He still does, totally, but in an entirely different way. Lydia’s not his goddess anymore. She’s one of his closest friends, and she has a mind sharp enough to cut diamonds and a love of sarcasm that rivals Stiles’s own. They’re an evil, platonic match made in heaven, and Stiles honestly wouldn’t have it any other way.

If he could, he’d tell his fifteen-year-old self that it’s okay not to win Lydia Martin’s heart, because he’s got something much better waiting for him just around the corner. He’s got Derek Hale. But fifteen was a weird time for Stiles, and the thought of hooking up with scary Derek Hale probably would have had him running for the hills. It’s not that Stiles didn’t know he was bi, it was just something he hadn’t really looked in the face yet. Like he was totally bi in theory, because hello hot guys on the internet, but the thought of actually touching another guy or kissing one? The thought of actually getting a dick inside him? Yeah no. At fifteen, Stiles wasn’t there yet. Girl were terrifying enough, thanks very much. Guys were a whole other layer of fear that Stiles wasn’t ready to unpackage yet.

And he’s really okay with that, in retrospect, because Derek was his first. His first and his only, and Stiles might totally be a romantic sap, but that seems kind of perfect to him. He’s never found it easy to open up to new people, not on any meaningful level. Derek is special. Derek is fucking everything to him.

And Stiles is going to save his life tonight.

Over lunch Scott fills him in on what’s new and nightmarish in Beacon Hills.

Jackson knows about werewolves now.

“Dude, I thought Derek was going to _kill_ him!”

Stiles considers that for a moment. “Probably, yeah.”

Scott’s jaw drops.

“Um, because Jackson is dangerous? Going around and making noise about werewolves? That’s not cool. And Derek’s got like issues, you know?”

“Issues?” Scott says dubiously. “He tried to kill Jackson!”

“Well, we’ve all thought about it,” Stiles offers, and eats a Twizzler. “Then what happened?”

“Then I fought Derek, and it ended when someone started shooting wolfsbane bullets at us.”

Sounds like Scott had a more interesting night than Stiles.

“Derek’s fucking _evil_ ,” Scott whispers.

He’s not, Stiles wants to tell him. He’s really not. He’s just hurting right now. The Argents are gunning for him, and there’s only one person he can trust wants them dead as much as he does: Peter. Peter, his only living pack member, and his alpha. Peter, who killed Derek's sister. It must be tearing him apart. Derek’s not evil. He's just been pushed beyond breaking point, and nobody sees it yet.

Stiles will, in the future.

There will be long, quiet nights where Derek talks about what happened back here, back now, and he can’t always look Stiles in the eye when he does. And Stiles will remind him that everything was messed up, that everyone was, and it doesn’t matter, okay? It doesn’t matter, because they have the kids, and the pack, and they have the future.

“I woke up in the woods with Deaton doing that whole fire thing to get the poison out,” Scott says. “I guess he’s really not the alpha.”

“Called it,” Stiles says, grinning around his Twizzler.

Scott looks at him like he’s crazy.

He probably is.

 

***

 

One of his last classes of the afternoon is Chemistry. Could Stiles’s day get any worse? There’s something perversely funny about asking that silent question when Stiles already knows the answer.

He tries to concentrate on his textbook, and on how to read a meniscus.

“Stiles,” Scott says suddenly, his voice low and urgent. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah.” Stiles rubs at his throat unconsciously. “Just spacing out, you know.”

Scott leans closer and lowers his voice. “You smell like blood.”

“What?”

Scott’s eyes widen. “Dude, your neck. You’re bleeding.”

Stiles draws his hand away from his throat and stares at it. His palm is covered in blood. “What? Fuck.”

He hears the echo of Peter’s voice in his mind.

_“I wanted a pack. I think I’ll take this one.”_

“Holy shit,” Scott says. “Mr. Harris, Stiles needs to go to the nurse!”

 

***

 

Stiles refuses to go to the nurse with Scott. Instead he goes to the nearest bathroom, rips a length of toilet paper off a roll, wads it against his throat and tries not to freak the fuck out. He slips a toilet seat down and sits, and wonders what’s worse: dying at the sawmill eleven years in the future, or in a school bathroom right now.

The second one. Definitely the second one. He’ll forever be known as the kid who died on a school toilet.

Scott crouches down in front of him, his eyes wide with concern. “What the hell is going on, Stiles? Did someone attack you?”

_Yeah, Scotty. Eleven years from now someone attacked me._

Stiles only grimaces, and pulls the wad of toilet paper away. “How bad is it?”

He’s still breathing, so obviously not as bad as it could be. Has been? Will be?

Fuck. Time travel grammar is hard and makes Stiles’s brain want to curl up and tremble like a tiny woodland creature.

Scott’s brow creases. “It’s… I dunno. I can’t see anything wrong.”

Stiles stares at the bloody toilet paper, and raises a shaking hand to his throat. His skin is slightly tacky with blood, but his probing fingers can’t find a wound. So… _not_ dying? That’s a relief. But also still troubling. Is this Deaton’s organic, adaptable time stream in action? Is it trying to put things back the way they should be? Is this the universe’s way of telling him that it’s always going to end like this?

Or is it a reminder to hurry up and _do_ something?

Because kids, right?

_“Tata, I want a juice box!”_

_“Five minutes, Conor. Let me finish up here first.”_

_“Is it five minutes yet, Tata?”_

_“It has been literally five seconds.”_

_“What about now?”_

Is Conor urging him to hurry up somehow, face screwed up impatiently, shifting his weight from foot to foot like he really has to pee? 

It’s probably bullshit, but that’s the scenario Stiles is going to go with. It’s the only one that offers any comfort at all, so yeah, he’s throwing all his faith behind it. It seems like the least terrifying option.

He drops his chin onto his chest and closes his eyes. “You could help me out a little, kid.”

“Stiles?” Scott asks.

“I’m okay,” Stiles tells him.

“Dude.” Scott reaches up and puts a hand on his shoulder. “You were bleeding and you don’t have a wound. That’s not okay. I don’t know what the hell that is.”

“It’s okay,” Stiles says, more to himself than to Scott. “It’s like psychosomatic or hysterical or something. It’s not a real wound.”

“Stiles! That’s even scarier!”

“Let’s table that for future debate,” Stiles tells him, cautiously touching his throat again, and trying his hardest not to remember how it felt to have Peter Hale’s claws sinking in beside his trachea, and then wrenching it out. “It’s not bleeding anymore, and I’m okay, and I promise I’ll go get checked out by your mom tomorrow to make sure it’s not some freaky tropical disease where you sweat blood or something, okay?”

Scott shows him his best puppy dog eyes.

“Scotty,” Stiles says, because he’s never been able to resist those. “It’s okay, yeah? I mean, it’s weird and freaky, and seriously fuck this town, bro, but I’ve got it under control, okay? Well, more or less. It’s no big thing, anyway. Trust me.” He grins slightly. “All we have to do is go to the dance tonight and enjoy ourselves. I’ll dance with Lydia, and you’ll sneak in and dance with Allison, and it’ll be perfect, right?”

“You remember you can’t lie to werewolves, right?” Scott asks him, raising his eyebrows.

Stiles gives him a shaky smile. “Story of my fucking life, dude!”

 

***

 

Okay, so.

Stiles straightens his suit and studies his reflection in the mirror. He looks like a scrawny hedgehog. What was he thinking with this buzz cut, seriously? There is a point in his life when Stiles finally grows into himself and even discovers a hairstyle he can rock, but clearly this is not yet that point.

He wipes his sweaty palms on his pants and heads downstairs.

His dad is waiting for him. And obviously he doesn’t want to make this awkward or whatever, but also he obviously can’t just ignore the fact that his kid is wearing a suit and pretending to be a grown up, or whatever rite of passage this is.

“Just, ah…” John clears his throat. “Just stand up against the wall there, okay? Let me get a picture of you.”

Stiles wrinkles his nose but stands in front of the wall as instructed, and even manages a smile as his dad snaps a few pictures with his phone. He can count on one hand the number of times he’s worn a suit in his life, and this was only the second. The first was his mom’s funeral. So, yeah, he lets his dad have this moment. A good memory to balance out a bad. Stiles figures John will hang onto it for at least five or six hours tops.

“Do I need to give you the talk, son?” John asks him sternly, slipping his phone back in his pocket.

“The—” Stiles almost laughs. Then he almost dies of embarrassment. “The talk? Oh, Jesus, Dad. No. Please, no. I know all about condoms and stuff, okay?”

“Good,” John says. “That’s half the talk.”

“Half the…”

“The other half is about clear and explicit consent,” John says. "No means no, and yes is the only thing that means yes. _I don’t know_ doesn’t mean yes. _Just a little_ doesn’t mean yes. _I’m not sure_ doesn’t mean yes. Drunk doesn’t mean yes. Got it?”

“Yeah, Dad,” Stiles says. “I’ve got it.”

“Then make sure you don’t forget it, kiddo,” his dad tells him. “And have a great night.”

Right.

A great night.

Stiles forces another smile, and heads out the door.

 


	11. Chapter 11

“Hey, Lydia,” Stiles says, opening the door of the Jeep for her. “You look beautiful.”

“I know.” She looks at him, looks at the Jeep, looks at him again, then climbs inside with a sigh.

She _does_ look beautiful. She’s wearing a strapless silver dress, and a puffy black bow-flower thing in her hair that looks kind of like one of those scrunchie loofahs from the dollar store. Stiles doesn’t make that comparison out loud.

The drive to the school is silent. Stiles taps the steering wheel nervously and chews his bottom lip, and thinks about running the Jeep off the road and crashing it just so tonight doesn’t have to happen.

But it _does_ , of course. It has to happen the way it always did, even if that means people getting hurt. Even if it means _Lydia_ getting hurt.

The school parking lot is almost full already.

Stiles snags a park near the buses, and walks Lydia inside.

He feels mostly numb, shaken occasionally by sharp spikes of panic he can’t control. The music is too loud. The gym is too crowded. It’s winter, but inside the dance it’s hot. Too many people, too many bodies, warm pockets of air pressing between them. Stiles takes his jacket off. Loses it immediately.

Lydia tries to ignore him. Stiles demands a dance, because that’s what he did the first time. She’s impressed by his gall, or something, and like a queen bestowing a boon on a gibbering peasant, leads him onto the dance floor.

Scott sneaks in. Dances with Allison.

Jackson has pregamed. He’s a belligerent drunk. Actually, he’s a belligerent everything. He wanders off outside, looking for the alpha who can make all his dreams of werewolf strength come true.

Lydia goes looking for him.

Stiles drinks half a cup of lukewarm punch, hates himself for knowing what’s happening to her right now and doing nothing to stop it, and then follows her outside.

 

***

 

The lights on the field blaze into life. Mist rises from the cold ground, as thick as smoke. Lydia is lying on the grass, pale, bloodied, and Stiles drops to his knees beside her. He presses a hand to one of the wounds on her neck, and her hot blood pumps between his fingers.

“Lydia. Lydia, Jesus, I’m so sorry, but you’re going to be okay. We’re all going to be okay.”

He looks up, stares into the light, and Peter Hale strides toward him.

He has the singular gaze of a predator stalking its prey. His black jacket sweeps out behind him. Then he has a claw hooked under Stiles’s chin, and he’s drawing Stiles to his feet. Stiles is like a puppet on a string, jerked upward by the force of his own panic, by the fear that Peter can so easily rip his throat out.

And fuck, he knows what that feels like.

Peter’s gaze is intent, as though he’s looking through Stiles, past the face he presents to the world and into something deeper. Stiles feels like a mouse, frozen under the stare of an owl.

It’s not Stiles that Peter wants though. It’s Derek.

“Derek took Scott’s phone,” Stiles babbles, Peter’s claw digging in. “It has GPS. I can help you find him! Just don’t kill Lydia, please. Please.”

Peter regards him curiously.

Stiles swallows. “Let me call…Let me call someone to come and get her, and I’ll help you find Scott’s phone. Please.”

He doesn’t remember if these are the exact things he said the first time, if this is the same desperate intonation he used. He can’t read Peter’s expression. He holds his breath as Peter leans in close, and presses his face to the side of Stiles’s neck and inhales slowly.

Stiles’s brain goes offline for a second.

 _That_ …that didn’t happen the first time, did it? Peter didn’t scent him the first time. Peter didn’t—

Didn’t open his mouth and drag his tongue against Stiles’s fluttering pulse point, and make a sound of deep satisfaction in the back of his throat.

Holy fuck.

That can’t be good.

 

***

 

This level of the mall parking lot is empty, apart from ex-nurse Jennifer’s car. Stiles recoils in horror when Peter opens the trunk of the car, and he sees the nurse’s body inside. It’s like watching a horror movie for a second time, and telling himself he’s not scared because he knows what’s coming, but he is. He is scared. He’s teetering on the edge of a full blown panic attack, trying to keep focussed, trying to keep his fear tightly corralled, but one misstep and it all goes to hell. One misstep and Stiles could die here tonight, and his future could die with him.

Peter closes the trunk again, and sets his laptop on it. He opens it, and gestures to Stiles.

Right. They’re tracking Scott’s phone.

“What’s the username, Stiles?” Peter asks. His breath is hot on Stiles’s cheek.

Stiles twists away and stares at the screen of the laptop. “I don’t know.”

“You’re lying.”

Stiles types in Scott’s username.

“And now the password.”

“I don’t know the—”

Peter stands behind him, his body flush against Stiles’s. He scrapes a claw along Stiles’s abdomen, snagging it in the fabric of his shirt. “Lie.”

Stiles types the password in.

“His username is ‘Allison’,” Peter says, a hint of disbelief in his voice. “His password is also ‘Allison’?”

“You sure you want him in your pack?” Stiles asks with more bravado than he feels.

Peter huffs out something that might be close to a laugh, and curls his hands around Stiles’s hips. Stiles’s fingers tremble over the keys of the laptop as Peter buries his face in his neck again.

“P-Peter…” He swallows. “Derek’s at your house. He’s at the Hale house.”

“Mmm.” Peter inhales deeply. “You smell good, Stiles. You smell like the sky just before rain. Like _magic_.” He grinds against him. “How does an insignificant brat like you smell like magic?”

Stiles’s breath hitches. “Please don’t. Please don’t.”

“You’re the first thing I’ve wanted to fuck since I woke up.”

Oh Jesus.

“Y-you need to find Derek, remember? You said you need to find Derek.”

Peter spins him around and shoves him against the trunk of the car. Cages him in with his arms, and pushes up against him. Gets a muscled thigh between Stiles’s legs and applies pressure.

Stiles squeezes his stinging eyes shut. “No, Peter. Please, no.”

Peter takes his arm and holds it. “Open your eyes, Stiles.”

Stiles obeys. He’s going to be sick. His body is shaking, alternately hot and then cold like he’s running a fever.

“I just want a pack, Stiles,” Peter says, his voice strangely plaintive even as he crowds into Stiles, and presses his erection against Stiles’s hip.

“You have a pack. You have Derek.” Stiles swallows.

Peter stills for a moment, and then a smile curves his mouth. “I like you, Stiles.”

Yeah, Stiles is getting that message. Peter likes him in a rapey-pedophile way. It’s not exactly comforting. It’s not even flattering. It’s fucking terrifying, because this isn’t how it went the first time, and that means anything can happen. It means Stiles is blind.

“I like you,” Peter repeats. He lifts Stiles’s wrist to his mouth. “Do you want the bite?”

Stiles shivers.

“Do you want the bite?” Peter asks again. “You’re young. You’re strong. It probably wouldn’t kill you.”

Does he want the bite?

He hears Conor’s voice in his head: _If he guesses, he won’t let you choose._

If he guesses _what_? If he guesses this has all happened before? If he guesses there’s magic at work here? If he guesses that Stiles’s answer might be _Maybe, one day, but not from you_.

“No,” Stiles forces out.

“Liar,” Peter whispers, and presses his mouth to the inside of Stiles’s wrist, against his hammering pulse. He licks, and Stiles tries uselessly to jerk his arm back. “You taste as good as you smell, Stiles.”

Stiles feels tears slide down his face.

Peter curls his lip and bares his fangs.

“No,” Stiles whimpers. “No, please, no! I don’t want it! I don’t want the bite! I want to stay me! Please, I have to stay _me_!”

Has to, or his future will change so drastically that maybe his kids will never exist. He’ll be a werewolf, he’ll be Peter’s beta. He’ll be monstrous, under Peter’s hand. He knows he will. Peter won’t guide him. Peter won’t train him to be stable. Peter will encourage him to go mad with bloodlust.

If Stiles is Peter’s beta, will he still be able to kill him tonight? Will those pieces of the puzzle still fall in place? No, because Stiles has to get out to the Hale house with Jackson, with the Molotov cocktails, and burn this motherfucker alive. And he can’t do that if he’s suddenly in Peter’s thrall.

“You want this, Stiles,” Peter tells him, and Stiles suddenly has no idea what ‘this’ means, because Peter’s shoving a hand down the front of his pants at the same time. “You want it. I can _smell_ it.”

Stiles tries to twist away, but he’s held fast. “I don’t! I don’t want the bite! Please, don’t bite me!”

Peter’s eyes flash red. “What aren’t you telling me, Stiles? Why do you smell like magic?”

_If he guesses, he won’t let you choose._

“I don’t know!” He hopes Peter mistakes the uptick in his heartbeat for panic, not another lie. “Please, I’ll do anything!”

And suddenly there’s space between them.

Stiles pants for breath, staring at Peter.

Peter smirks at him, and runs his tongue over his bottom lip. “Go on then.”

“Wh-what?” Stiles can hardly hear anything over the buzzing in his skull.

Peter gestures at him. “On your knees. You can start by blowing me, and then I’m going to fuck you over the trunk of the car. By the time I’m done with you, sweetheart, you’ll _wish_ you’d chosen the bite. In fact, I’ll bet I can get you to beg for it before we’re through.”

Stiles’s blood runs cold.

“On your knees,” Peter repeats.

Stiles scrubs at his tears with the heels of his hands, swallows, and drops onto his knees. He’s shaking, dizzy and sick to the stomach. “You fucking ped.”

Peter smirks and shrugs. “Do I seem like the sort of man who is constrained by conventional morality?”

“You’re supposed to be an alpha,” Stiles tells him. “And here you are, threatening to rape a kid instead of going to rescue Derek. You don’t deserve a pack.”

Peter’s eyes flash red and he growls.

Stiles sucks in a shaking breath. “You don’t deserve Derek, and you don’t deserve Scott! You don’t deserve any betas! And you sure as fuck don’t deserve me!”

Peter roars, and lunges at him.

 _This is it,_ Stiles thinks wildly. _This is how I die_.

Maybe it was fate, despite everything.

Maybe Peter Hale was always going to kill him, one way or another.

 

***

 

Something snaps in Stiles’s shoulder as Peter lifts him up and throws him. He barely has a second to register the white hot flash of pain, and then he hits the concrete wall of the parking garage, and his skull cracks.

 

***

 

When he comes to, Peter is gone.

Stiles has no memory of getting himself to the hospital.

He’s sitting in the hall outside Lydia’s room, holding a stack of gauze pads to the back of his head when his dad finds him and demands to know what the hell happened to him, to Lydia, to this whole goddamn night.

“I don’t know,” he says, over and over again. “Dad, I don’t know!”

“Stiles,” John says, his mouth twisted up. “ _Talk_ to me, kiddo. That girl in there, Lydia, she could die, and I need to know that you—” He shakes his head, unable to finish the question.

Stiles’s stomach twists. Suddenly his dad’s no-means-no talk from earlier tonight seems something less like advice and more like an accusation. A part of Stiles wants to demand how his dad can even think such a thing, but in some ways his dad has more experience dealing with monsters than Stiles. And he knows they can be anyone.

“What about the Whittemore kid? Was she with the Whittemore kid?”

“I don’t know,” Stiles repeats, and his dad turns away, his hands clenching into fists.

Stiles knows that sooner or later some doctor will decide Lydia’s injuries are from a mountain lion, but until then…well, until then his dad’s going to carry that suspicion in his eyes. In his heart too, maybe. It’ll make it so much easier to shatter when Stiles finally tells one lie to many and breaks the trust between them.

Stiles doesn’t have time to cry.

He watches as his dad rounds the corner, talking into his radio.

Stiles rises to his feet. His head is throbbing and his shoulder is too, and there are twinges of pain nipping their way up and down his spine. The fingers in his right hand are numb, whatever that means.

When Chris Argent grabs him by the front of the shirt and slams him up against a wall, Stiles yelps in pain.

“Where’s Scott?” Chris asks.

It’s the second time tonight Stiles has been manhandled by an older guy with intense eyes. He wishes he could find that funny. And really, when it comes to older guys, Chris definitely does more for him than Peter does. Always has.

“I’m not listening to this!” Allison had squealed, aghast, one night of the full moon when the wolves in the pack were out running in the Preserve.

“No, seriously, go on,” Lydia had said, waving the half empty bottle of wine in Stiles’s face. “Tell me more about this whole daddy kink thing you’ve discovered.”

“I’m jus’ saying,” Stiles had slurred, forgetting for a moment why this was a terrible idea, “that Chris is totally fucking hot and yes, in that scenario, I would prob’ly call him Daddy.”

“Mmm.” Lydia had nodded and swigged from the bottle. “Me too.”

“La la la!” Allison had yelled, her hands over her ears. “I’m not listening!”

Yeah, it’s a thing. It’s a thing that Stiles would never act on in a million years, but he has eyes. And also a very active imagination.

“What are you smirking about, Stiles?” Chris asks. “You think this isn’t serious?”

“I think I have a concussion,” Stiles tells him.

“You think Scott is still your friend? Scott is not your friend anymore. He’ll turn on you. It’s in his nature.”

“No,” Stiles says. He’s never been more certain of a thing in his life. “Not Scotty.”

“He’ll turn on you,” Chris repeats, “and you’ll have to put him down.”

“I’m sorry that happened to you,” Stiles tells him. “But it’s not going to happen to me.”

Chris releases him with a shake of his head, like he thinks Stiles is a fool.

Stiles stumbles away.

 

***

 

“You’re bleeding,” Jackson says as the trees hurtle past the Porsche.

At least he’s stopped bitching about how his car isn’t meant to go on back roads, or off road, or what the fuck ever.

Stiles lifts a hand to the back of his head.

“No,” Jackson says. “Your neck.”

“Doesn’t matter,” Stiles mutters.

They’re almost there.

 

***

 

Scott is hurt.

Chris is.

Kate… Kate is already dead inside the remains of the Hale house.

Good.

Peter is horrifying in his alpha form. A hunched-over monstrous half-beast of a thing, with red eyes and slavering jaws.

Stiles throws the Molotov cocktail.

Peter catches it.

And they’re not a team yet, they’re nowhere near a team yet, but Allison looses one of her incendiary arrows straight at the bottle. Pierces it, and Peter howls as his arm and half his body is engulfed in flame.

Jackson throws the second Molotov cocktail, and Peter is consumed by fire.

Stiles stumbles to his knees.

Hears Scott yell something at Derek, but Derek keeps advancing on Peter.

Stiles looks up again in time to see Derek tear Peter’s throat out with his claws.

Derek’s eyes flash red. “I’m the alpha now.”

Stiles bursts into tears of relief.

 


	12. Chapter 12

It’s at least a few hours before Stiles can ditch Scott and the others and get back to the Hale house. He pulls over to pick up the bone saw on the way. His head is killing him, and his shoulder is, and he has to make the entire drive in first because he can’t change gears. Also he almost runs off the road a few times because he’s having problems staying focused, but he tells himself it’s not that dangerous if he can barely get over ten miles an hour.

Derek’s not at the Hale house when Stiles pulls up, but Peter’s body still is. It smells like barbeque, and Stiles can’t actually deal with that fact. His concussion is making him queasy enough, thanks, without the added help.

God.

This is disgusting.

The moonlight is bright tonight. Full moon, naturally. Stiles wishes it was darker, so he didn’t actually have to see what he was doing. But no, he might as well be doing this under floodlights.

It’s sickening.

He squats down beside Peter’s body and sets the bone saw against his charred throat. Holds it there with his left hand, because his right shoulder hurts so much he can’t use his right hand properly. Can’t even lift it properly. The teeth of the saw snag in burned flesh. Stiles tries to imagine that Peter is dead wood, and he’s a lumberjack. Like a cool, hipsterish lumberjack, with a hot beard, a woolen hat, and a Connie Converse playlist on Spotify.

He draws the saw along Peter’s throat, and gags.

It’s the most revolting thing he’s ever had to do in his life, but it’s necessary.

It’s for his future.

It’s for his kids.

And it’s for Derek.

Still, he has to stop and vomit the next time he makes a cut.

“Oh, fuck my life,” he mutters, wiping his mouth on the back of his hand and putting the saw in place.

Which is worse? The smell of burnt flesh or the rasping sound of the saw’s teeth against Peter’s trachea? It’s an impossible debate Stiles has the feeling he’ll be having for the rest of his life, unless he can get some top grade therapy or, failing that, learns to drink to forget.

He’s dismembering a corpse.

That’s not a life skill he ever thought he’d need to develop.

Fuck Beacon Hills, seriously.

“Stiles?”

Stiles squeaks, and flails backward, and ends up on his ass in the leaves.

“Stiles?” Derek’s voice is a low growl. His eyes are glowing red. He’s breathing heavily, shoulders rising and falling, like he’s only barely got a handle on the power coursing through him now. “What the fuck are you doing?”

“Um.” Stiles shrugs lopsidedly. “Nothing?”

“Nothing. Because it looks like you’re trying to cut Peter’s head off.”

“Yes,” Stiles says, swallowing. “Yes, that’s exactly what I’m doing.”

Derek curls his lip in a growl. “Why?”

Stiles’s mouth drops open, but he has to struggle to find some words. Any words. “Um. Making sure?”

“Making sure of what?” Derek demands. “That he’s not a vampire?”

Seriously, why do people think Derek has no sense of humor?

“Sort of?” Stiles asks.

“Get the fuck off my land, Stiles,” Derek growls.

Oh, that’s why people say Derek has no sense of humor.

“No, I have to—”

“Get the hell out of here!”

“No!” Stiles yells back. “No, I fucking won’t! Not until I cut your uncle’s head off and burn his motherfucking body!”

Derek roars.

“Oh! Oh! Scary alpha!” Stiles tightens his grip on the bone saw. “Real scary, Der! Color me intimidated!”

He remembers a little to late that Derek doesn’t know him yet. Or at least he doesn’t like him yet.

Before he knows it Derek is pulling him to his feet, a fist bunched in his shirt, and Stiles’s toes are scrabbling to find the ground. The movement jolts his shoulder, and he hisses in agony.

“Oh, fuck you!” he yells right into Derek’s shifted face. “Fuck you! I’ve had enough with being thrown around tonight. First Peter, then Chris and now—” His anger dissolves into sobs. “Fuck you! This is _important_!”

Derek looks startled. His face shifts back to human, and he releases Stiles. “Why?”

“Because it is,” Stiles tells him, legs shaking underneath him like he’s a newborn colt. “Because it’s everything.”

“You’re not making any sense,” Derek says and glares.

“Oh, I know.” Stiles huffs, trying to ignore the pain in his shoulder. “And as much as I’d love to blame it on my fucking concussion, I can’t, okay? Because I hate this cryptic bullshit as much as anyone, but this is how it’s gotta be, okay? And I know you don’t trust me, you don’t even _know_ me, but—”

“I know you,” Derek says, and looks suddenly, intensely uncomfortable. He takes a step backward.

_What?_

“But you don’t trust me,” Stiles counters.

“I know you’re not lying.”

Stiles can work with that. “Then don’t beat the shit out of me, okay? Because I’m gonna do this.” He kneels down in front of Peter’s corpse and positions the saw while trying his hardest not to look at him. “And not just because he bad touched me tonight, the fucking creep.”

“He _what_?”

Stiles is startled by Derek’s sharp tone. He shakes his head. “Doesn’t matter.” He tries to draw the saw back, but his hand is shaking too much. “Fuck you, Peter. Fuck you.”

And then he’s crying again, and his head really hurts, and his shoulder does, and this shouldn’t be the hardest thing he’s had to do tonight. He should be whistling whiles he works, right? He could be Beheady, the eighth dwarf that Disney doesn’t talk about.

“Stiles?” Derek touches his left shoulder tentatively, like he’s afraid Stiles will flinch away.

Stiles doesn’t. Couldn’t if his life depended on it. He leans into Derek’s touch instead, and cries harder. And then Derek is kneeling beside him, and has an arm around his shoulders, and it doesn’t matter that it hurts like hell, and it doesn’t matter if this Derek isn’t _his_ Derek, not yet. He’s still the only person Stiles wants right now.

“Do you need to go to the hospital?” Derek asks in a quiet voice.

“No,” Stiles mumbles, leaning his head against Derek’s shoulder. “It wasn’t… Wasn’t as bad as it could have been. He, um, shoved his hand down my pants and said he was gonna fuck me. That’s all.”

Except now the weight of his terror has lifted, the empty space it left inside him is filled with a million different what-if scenarios, and Stiles sees for the first time how close he came. To being raped, to being bitten, to being killed. Or to all three of them, probably. It wasn’t as bad as it could have been, but it’s still more than bad enough.

And it’s so easy to take comfort from Derek’s presence, even if this Derek isn’t yet _his_ Derek, even if he shouldn’t. It feels right. For the first time in days something feels right.

“Give me the saw, Stiles.”

“What?” he snuffles, getting snot all over Derek’s shirt.

“Give me the saw,” Derek repeats. His tone is steady. “And close your eyes.”

 

***

 

“He wasn’t always like that,” Derek says later, his voice low. It sounds close to breaking.

“I know.” Stiles shrugs at Derek’s sharp look. “Your family, dude. They were good people. He must’ve been, once. Makes sense.”

Derek is pale under the moonlight. There are bags under his eyes. Stiles wants to hold him, to promise him that it’s all going to be okay. To tell him that he’s not going to be lonely forever. That there will be late nights rocking babies to sleep. That there will be mornings they try and sleep in except suddenly their bed will be full of their kids, all sharp elbows and squirms and giggles. That there will be days when shit is so ridiculously hectic that they won’t even have time to breathe, but there will be quiet nights as well. Nights when the kids are asleep in bed and Stiles and Derek spend hours taking one another apart with tongues and fingers and whispered words of love.

“I think the fire broke something in him,” Derek says, his voice cracking.

The fire broke something in Derek too. Something that will never be truly repaired. But Stiles thinks that maybe the jagged edges of that wound have softened over time. Derek will always carry the loss with him, but in the future he remembers how to be happy. Stiles has made sure of that.

Stiles sets the gas can down. He digs a box of matches from his pocket. He grips the box with difficulty in his right hand—he can’t ask Derek to do this, he knows. Not fire. Not ever fire. He strikes a match and tosses it down onto Peter’s remains. A sudden flare of heat and flame. He steps back, and holds his nose. The stench of Peter’s body burning is making him dizzy.

He takes another step backward and stumbles.

Okay, so maybe his concussion isn’t helping matters.

“Stiles?” Derek’s brow creases with concern. He grabs Stiles by the elbow.

“You’re gonna be a good alpha, Derek,” Stiles whispers. “The best.”

“Stiles…” Derek’s gaze suddenly sharpens. He frowns. “Stiles, you need to go to the hospital.”

Stiles would shake his head, but that would hurt too much probably. “I’m okay. I’m—”

And suddenly he’s not. His vision goes fuzzy, and then darkens rapidly as though a cloud has suddenly passed over the moon. His legs give out underneath him.

He pitches forward, and Derek catches him before he hits the ground.

 

***

 

Everything is weird and hazy, but the Camaro purrs like an animal.

“Can I drive?” Stiles asks hopefully.

Both Dereks sitting in the driver’s seat glare at him. They are slightly out of sync. “No.”

Grumpywolf.

Grumpydoublevisionwolf.

Stiles reaches out and strokes the dash. “I am so sorry, you hot fucking beast. Omigod, I am so, so sorry.” He pets the dash gently. “Derek, how is this car so _clean_?”

 

***

 

Stiles blacks out again, and doesn’t really mind that much. When he blinks very slowly back into something resembling consciousness, there is someone standing close by him listing all of his injuries in a calm, precise voice.

Skull fracture. Concussion. Possible internal bleeding. Dislocated shoulder.

It’s all very medical drama with bright lights and pastel scrubs and people calling out things Stiles doesn’t understand, like _BP something over something_ , and _I need 5 mils of drug-Stiles-has-never-heard-of-before_ , and _stat!_ It all very terse and dramatically understated, except Stiles’s brain is stuck between channels and all he’s getting is static. He remembers visiting his grandma when he was little, before she died, and how she had an old TV with rabbit ears that you needed to angle right and wiggle to get a picture. And it was still ninety percent snow. That is where Stiles’s brain is now. There’s a medical drama playing on the TV, but Stiles is getting a headache trying to concentrate on it.

He tries to sit up, and they make him lie down again.

Okay, well. They leave him no choice.

He turns his head and vomits off the side of the gurney instead.

Someone shines a flashlight in his eyes, and he yelps and tries to lift a hand to bat them away.

“Where’s…” He squints, but he can’t actually focus on anything. He can only see vague shapes, and the light hurts his eyes. “Where’s…”

“Your dad’s on his way,” a woman says, and hey, it’s Scott’s mom. It’s Melissa. “He’s on his way, okay?”

“Der,” he slurs.

“He’s on his way, Stiles,” Melissa repeats. “Can you understand me, Stiles?”

Yeah, but she can’t understand him apparently.

He tries again, but he’s too tired to try for a third time.

There’s light in his eyes again, and seriously? Why the fuck do they keep doing that? He flinches away. The sudden movement jars his shoulder, and pain so hot it’s white flares through him.

“Stiles,” Melissa says, and her voice sounds suddenly very distant. “Stiles? You need to lie still for me, okay?”

_Then stop with the fucking light!_

His words come out garbled, like a drunk’s.

The light is so fucking bright. When it stares to fade at last, Stiles is relieved. The sharp white edges of it are slowly diffused with gentle green, and Stiles takes a breath that smells like fresh rain and petrichor.

He lifts his hand, and drops it again.

Leaves crinkle under his fingers.

Nothing hurts here.

He blinks into the soft light.

There’s a small boy standing on a very large stump. A sapling grows out of the middle of a crack in the dead wood. The boy is watching it, his back turned to Stiles.

“Conor?” Stiles asks, his breath catching in his throat.

Conor turns and smiles at him.

“Conor?”

Conor steps down from the Nemeton. He opens his mouth, and the sound that comes out of his mouth is the same as the wind rustling gently in the canopy of the trees. And then the sound coalesces into words.

“You’re safe, Tata,” Conor says, his amber eyes bright. “You can come home now.”

Stiles cries in relief.

 

***

 

“Stiles?”

Okay, so what’s going on now? He’s in a hospital bed. What even...?

“Stiles?”

“Derek?” he slurs.

Oh shit. The Camaro. Derek is going to be pissed.

Lydia…lying on the field, her pretty silver dress stained dark with—

With blood.

Fire too. There was fire. Peter wreathed in it, screaming.

There was…

There was a deer?

The car…the car flipping.

Oh shit. The _boys_.

Panic grips him as he struggles into something closer to wakefulness, and Derek is holding his hand, drawing his pain in inky black lines that climb his forearm. His face is pale, his mouth a thin line.

“What...” It’s too much effort to finish the question.

“Stiles,” Derek says, and Stiles can almost taste the fear rolling off him in waves. “Stiles, where’s Luke?”

“I don’t…” Everything is strange and muddled, and Stiles can’t make sense of it. And then he remembers hanging upside down in his seatbelt, and hearing Luke wail as someone took him away.

Someone…

His head throbs, and he fights the urge to be sick.

He should know this. He should be able to concentrate on this, except why can he hear the song that he and Lydia danced to at the formal all those years ago swirling around somewhere in the back of his skull?

“What…what’s going on, Der?” he whispers.

Derek’s expression crumples.

The door to the hospital room opens and Deaton steps inside.

“I came as soon as Scott called me,” he says. His gaze falls on Stiles, and he offers him a tiny, sympathetic smile. Then he looks at Derek, and that small smile vanishes. His expression is grave. “Derek, the Alpha Pack has Luke.”

 


	13. Chapter 13

“Time travel?” Lydia asks back at the house.

“Yup.” Stiles accepts a firearm from Chris Argent, and then a second one.

“When did this happen?” Then she makes a face. “I mean, it would leave a fracture, right?”

“Not necessarily,” Deaton says smoothly. “Time is very—”

“Adaptive,” Stiles says. “Organic. Like a tree. Nature, Zen, circle of life, whatever.” He checks his thigh holster, wincing when his ribs hurt. “And it was a few days before winter formal. I think I got knocked out at lacrosse practice thanks to Jackson. That’s when I jumped in. Jumped out again a few hours after Peter was dead.”

“I’m confused,” Liam announces and Scott nods.

“It’s par for the course at this point, Liam,” Stiles tell him.

“I remember that night,” Derek says. “I mean, of course I remember that night. But you came back to the house. You passed out.”

“That sounds like me, yeah,” Stiles says with a grimace.

“You were nice to me.”

“What?” Stiles can really only remember the night in flashes, thanks to the concussion Peter gave him. He remembers throwing up when he tried to cut Peter’s head off. That’s the sort of memory that really sticks.

Derek flushes. “It was the first time? First time anyone was. Apart from all the…”

“Corpse desecration?” Stiles asks.

His dad’s jaw drops.

Derek’s mouth twitches, and he nods. “You said I’d be a good alpha.”

“Called it,” Stiles says, his chest tightening.

Derek isn’t great with PDAs, and he’s not the same guy he was then. He doesn’t need anyone to reassure him anymore. He knows who he is now. But Stiles still steps close to him and puts his arms around his neck. He presses his face against Derek’s throat.

“Let’s go and get our son back, alpha.”

Derek nods, and his eyes flash red.

 

***

 

It’s weird.

Things at the sawmill happen pretty much the way Stiles almost-remembers them happening the last time. It’s like he saw it in a movie once, but he hasn’t seen that movie in years, and when he’s watching it again he kind of knows what’s going to happen, but also maybe he was thinking of a different movie this whole time?

But he gets in, and he gets Luke, and the pack takes down the alphas.

Afterward he’s sitting in the front of his dad’s cruiser while Luke dozes on the back seat. He lifts his head as Derek approaches.

John is walking beside him.

He reaches out a hand to steady Derek with Derek stumbles a little—Stiles’s heart skips a beat, because this is almost exactly how things played out that night with Peter—and then John’s pulling Derek into a hug.

Derek always looks weirdly surprised when John hugs him, and also a little uncomfortable, like he’s not sure if he’s allowed to be relaxing into this, or exactly how much he should hug back. He always looks like he should be trying harder to resist this kind of emotional stuff, even though he clearly wants it. He’s an idiot. He might be the alpha, but even alphas can use hugs, right?

Stiles smiles wearily at him as he returns the hug and pats John on the back.

“Let’s get you boys home,” John says. “Parrish and I will take care of the…”

He waves his hand vaguely at the sawmill, and the expression on his face says he clearly didn’t sign up for this bullshit, but someone’s gotta do it.

Right.

The bodies.

His dad is the best.

 

***

 

Stiles wants to sleep for at least sixty hours straight, but sleep is a luxury for non-parents only. Between them, he and Derek are the walking wounded. Stiles still has a vague headache from his earlier concussion from the car accident, still has his cracked ribs, and Derek is healing very slowly from the wounds the Alpha Pack inflicted.

Lydia is waiting up for them. She hugs them both tightly, kisses Luke on the top of the head, and asks if there’s anything they need.

“We’re good,” Stiles tells her.

“Okay.” She smiles at him. “I’m going to head back into town if you’re sure.”

“You can crash here if you want.”

“I’m going to meet Jordan at his place.”

“Okay. If I didn’t tell him thanks, and I probably didn’t because my head was all over the place, can you? I mean, I’ll tell him tomorrow. And the next day. And every day for the rest of my life, probably, but just in case I forgot tonight?”

Lydia’s smile grows. “I’ll make sure he knows.”

“Love you, Lyds.”

“Don’t call me that.” She leans up and kisses him on the cheek. “Love you too.”

Stiles locks the door behind her. He and Derek would both like nothing more than to tumble straight into bed, but they have to take care of Luke first.

He’s dead to the world, but he’s also as filthy as hell. So are Derek and Stiles. In the end, because Luke refuses to wake up long enough to stand on his own two feet, Derek holds him while Stiles strips him off, and they all climb into the shower together.

Stiles can’t help smiling as the hot water hits him.

“What?” Derek asks, a hand over Luke’s face to shield him from the direct spray.

“Nothing,” Stiles says. “Just, remember when we got this shower we were going to have like all sorts of wild, crazy sex in here?”

Derek’s eyebrows shoot up. “Um, I don’t think that was ever agreed upon.”

“It was my implicit understanding,” Stiles tells him. He grabs the shampoo and squirts some into his palms. Then he gently lathers Luke’s hair while Luke cuddles with his daddy. “And now we’re doing this instead.”

“This is good too,” Derek tells him, mouth quirking.

Stiles tries to ignore the slash marks across Derek’s chest that are still leaking a little blood. “Yeah, this is good too.”

Luke mumbles something.

“You okay, kiddo?” Stiles asks, running a sponge down his back.

“Tickles,” Luke giggles, and buries his face in Derek’s neck.

Stiles gasps. “How did a tickle monster get in here with us?” He grabs Luke’s toes, and Luke squeals.

Derek rolls his eyes, but he can’t stop the smile spreading across his face. “It’s the middle of the night, Stiles.”

“Uh oh,” Stiles says. “Daddy doesn’t like the tickle monster!”

Luke giggles again, and pokes his foot out so Stiles can tickle it again.

When they finally get out of the shower, tracking water all over the floor, Stiles is beyond tired. He dresses Luke in his pajamas, finds a pair of sleep pants for himself, then hoists Luke up onto his hip and hesitates in the hallway.

“You want to sleep with me and Daddy tonight?” he asks.

Luke, a thumb jammed in his mouth, nods.

There are already two little lumps in the bed. He and Derek get into bed on either side of Claudie and Conor, and settle Luke down somewhere in that little nest of sleepy, warm kids.

“Tata!” Conor yawns and curls toward Stiles. He puts his hand on Stiles’s cheek. “You’re home now.”

“Yeah, I’m home, kiddo.”

“Claudie was scared,” Conor tells him, “but I wasn’t.”

“Not even a little bit?”

Conor shakes his head. “The Nemeton told me you would come home again.”

Stiles curls his fingers through Conor’s. “You and that tree, huh?”

Conor smiles proudly, and wriggles closer.

It takes a while, but Stiles eventually falls asleep to the sounds of his kids breathing.

 

***

 

When Stiles wakes up sometime late the next morning, the kids have skedaddled, and Stiles has migrated over into Derek’s space. He’s clinging to him like an octopus, arms around Derek’s torso, and one leg over his hip. It’s kind of uncomfortable, actually, but fuck it, Stiles is never moving.

Not until Derek gets a hand down the back of his sleep pants and clutches his ass.

 _Then_ Stiles is moving.

Well, if rutting back and forward along Derek’s thigh is moving.

Derek’s body shakes as he laughs silently. He presses a hand against Stiles's ribs to draw his pain. 

“Don’t fucking tease me, asshole,” Stiles mutters. He arches his back and rubs his cheek against Derek’s. “Also, never get rid of this beard, okay? It’s hot. Your beard is hot.” He licks a stripe along Derek’s cheek, the neat hair surprisingly soft against his tongue. It’s hardly longer than stubble really, but it totally works. “Should I grow a beard?”

“No,” Derek says.

“But—”

“You remember when you were twenty and that thing happened on your face? No beard, Stiles.”

“Maybe this time it wouldn’t look so scraggly?”

“Claudie cried.”

“She did not!”

“ _I_ cried,” Derek mutters.

“Asshole,” Stiles tells him. “I will fight you, bro!”

The best part about Derek is that he totally lets Stiles win. Of course, in reality he’s letting them both win, because he ends up on his back on the mattress with Stiles straddling his hips and pinning his wrists down.

“Come on, Der,” Stiles says, squirming. “Come on, fuck me.”

Derek looks pointedly at the door. It’s still ajar.

“Fine!” Stiles clambers off him. “Kill the romance!”

“Romance?” Derek quirks a brow.

Stiles closes the door and locks it. Not that the flimsy lock would stop a determined little werewolf, or a determined little mage either, but it should at least give them a few seconds warning.

“Fine.” Stiles rattles around in his bedside cabinet to find the lube. “Romance. Don’t fuck me, Derek. Please put your throbbing manhood in my trembling flower?”

Derek looks like he ate something rancid. “That’s worse!”

“Better just fuck me then.” Stiles grins at him and waggles his eyebrows.

“I’d better,” Derek agrees.

Stiles tosses him the lube, and he catches it. A second later he catches Stiles too, because he trips over trying to get his pants off, and almost faceplants on the bed. Derek huffs with laughter, and hauls Stiles further up onto the mattress. He positions him on his back and kisses him lazily while Stiles runs his fingers through his hair.

The first touch of lube to his hole is cold, and Stiles jolts. Then he shivers as Derek starts to open him up. They’ve done this what feels like a million times, but every time still feels a little like the first. There’s always that moment when Stiles just can’t believe that he gets this, that he gets _Derek_ , and that the universe has made some terrible mistake because he shouldn’t be this lucky.

And Derek always looks like he’s thinking the exact same thing.

Stiles is squirming restlessly by the time Derek is up to two fingers, and pegging his prostate with unerring accuracy every time. Stiles is hard and leaking, and ready for more, but Derek is a total dick who likes to tease him.

“Der,” he moans. “Come on. Let me ride you, yeah?”

“Yeah,” Derek whispers, leaning down to kiss him deeply before rolling off him and tugging his pants down.

“Jesus,” Stiles says, his voice low. “Look at you. All mine.”

“All yours,” Derek agrees, pumping his dick lazily. His grin is a little feral. Stiles loves it.

He straddles Derek again, shivering in anticipation. Then he’s sliding down onto Derek’s dick, arching his back at the stretch, and it feels so fucking good. He groans as he seats himself fully, and leans over Derek for a kiss. Then he straightens up again, and starts to rock into a slow, lazy rhythm. What? Derek’s not the only one allowed to tease.

Derek curls his fingers around Stiles’s hips, and claws pinch his skin.

“Stiles,” Derek moans. “Faster, please.”

“Shh.” Stiles grins. “I want it slow.”

“Liar.” Derek slams his head back against the mattress, his muscles straining.

Stiles bites his lip to stop from laughing, but it’s okay. He knows, sooner rather than later that he’ll have to pick up the pace. And he knows that he won’t even need to tire himself out, thanks to Derek’s werewolf strength. Derek can very easily help lift Stiles up and down for as long as this takes. Fucking up against walls is still one of Stiles’s favourite things, and Derek hardly breaks a goddamn sweat. It’s pretty awesome. Stiles is without doubt the luckiest guy in the universe.

And did he mention that Derek takes it as a point of pride to never finish first? And he loves it when Stiles comes when he’s inside him.

So, yeah, luckiest guy in the universe.

 

***

 

Stiles has the shaky uncertain gait of a baby giraffe when he finally staggers downstairs. And Derek is smirking like an asshole.

“Tata! Daddy!” Claudie appears from the kitchen, spatula in hand. “We’re making pancakes for lunch!”

“You’re using the stove?”

“I’m _ten_ , Tata,” Claudie tells him haughtily. “I’m not a baby!”

“And I’m supervising,” John yells from the kitchen.

Stiles heads inside to find his dad sitting at the table reading a newspaper. “When did you sneak in, Dad?”

“About an hour ago,” John says. “The kids said you boys were—” Air quotes. “— _sleeping in_.”

“Yes,” Stiles said. “That’s exactly what we were doing.”

John snorts.

Derek does too. So much for solidarity.

“Anyway,” John says. “I wanted to let you know I spoke to Deaton, and Isaac’s healing well. He should be up and about again in a few hours.”

“Good,” Stiles says, relieved. “That’s good.”

He sits down next to his dad and, seconds later, Claudie proudly slides a weirdly-shaped pancake in front of him.

“Thanks, Claudie,” he says. “This looks great!” She tries to get back to the stove, but Stiles grabs her for a hug. “Love you, growly girl.”

“I _know_ , Tata,” she says. She rolls her eyes, like he’s said something silly.

“And you love me too,” he reminds her.

“Yes,” she whispers, and hugs him back. “I love you too, Tata.”

Luke wanders over. He’s wearing a lot of pancake batter. He climbs into Stiles’s lap, and then decides he wants his grandpa instead, and then his Daddy. Stiles wonders how long it’s going to be until he doesn’t need to be constantly held anymore.

Derek shares his pancake, as lopsided as Stiles’s, with Luke, and makes interested noises while Luke goes through one of his picture books with him.

Conor very carefully carries over a coffee for Derek, and then one for Stiles.

“You’re not too big to sit on my lap,” Stiles tells him, and makes good on his threat.

Conor grins at him, and picks a blueberry out of his pancake.

“You,” Stiles tells him, running a hand over Conor’s unruly hair, “are incredible.”

Conor wrinkles his nose. “Tata!”

“I mean it,” Stiles says firmly. “You are incredible. You _all_ are, and I love you all very much, and yes, I am being a total sap right now, and if any of you make fun of me for it I will withhold _all_ the Christmas presents this year.”

John snorts. “Yeah, right.”

Even Luke doesn’t believe that for a second.

Claudie dances over to the table with more pancakes, and sits down beside her grandpa. John puts an arm around her and kisses the top of her head. “Thanks, princess. These are wonderful.”

“Better than Tata’s?” she asks him with an evil grin.

“I plead the fifth,” John says.

Conor giggles.

“Daddy! Daddy, look!” Luke jabs a finger at a page of his book. “It’s a lion! Lions go _rawr_! _Rawr_!”

Derek roars back. A proper thundering alpha roar. Luke squeals with delight.

John spills his coffee all over the table. “Jesus Christ! Warn an old guy, Derek!”

Claudie dissolves into peals of laughter.

Derek grins at Stiles from across the table.

 _This_ , Stiles thinks. This is what he fought for. This is what he will _always_ fight for.

And it will always be worth it.

 


	14. Chapter 14

 

_Two weeks later_

Stiles stands in front of the examination table at the animal clinic, and jiggles his leg.

“You holding up okay?” Scott asks him as he examines Obi-Wan.

This morning was Conor’s first day back at school after his suspension. Stiles has been thinking about him all day, and sending Derek a series of increasingly frantic text messages. He’s been unable to concentrate on work. All the time he should have spent ironing out the design problems in someone’s website has instead been spent researching home schooling, because fuck yes, he _will_ go there. He feels supremely unqualified to go there, but he will, if the school doesn’t sort its shit out.

He was actually very calm this morning when he told Mrs. Landerson as much. That he didn’t agree with Conor’s suspension, and that bullying by exclusion was still bullying, and yes, while he realizes he can’t force the other kids to like Conor, he thinks the teachers could set a better example by making sure Conor is included in group activities, and doesn’t just go and hide in a corner like it turns out he’s been doing.

Mrs. Landerson was surprisingly receptive. It turns out she likes Stiles a lot more when he’s not in a tree.

“Yeah. It’s just, _ugh_. I want him to be okay, but I don’t want to make such a big deal out of it that it stresses him out more than he already is, you know?” He shakes his head. “This parenting shit is _hard_ , bro!”

Scott nods, looks suddenly anxious, and turns his attention back to Obi-Wan. “She’s got a few fleas.”

“Yes, dogs get those,” Stiles tells him. “Which one of us is supposed to be the expert?”

Scott gives him a look. “She’s got them because you haven’t been keeping up with her treatment. It’s once a month, Stiles, not once every five or six weeks, or whenever you remember.”

“What are you? The flea police?”

“Put a reminder in your phone,” Scott tells him sternly. He gives Obi-Wan her vaccination with the quick, precise ease of someone who’s done this a thousand times before, slipping the needle into the scruff of her neck. Obi-Wan looks like she doesn’t even notice. Scott pats her, tells her she’s a good girl, and then screws up his face and turns back to Stiles. “So, um, can you keep a secret?”

“Not really.” Stiles lifts Obi-Wan down from the table. “Wait, are you serious? Then of course I can. What’s going on?”

Scott looks somehow terrified and elated at the same time. “Ally’s pregnant.”

“Dude!” Stiles holds his hand up. “High five! You’re gonna be a dad!” Then he thinks about it. “Or an uncle? How does that work?”

Scott ignores his hand and raises his eyebrows. “A kid can have two dads, you know, Stiles.”

“Right. Pot, meet kettle. So congrats to you and Ally and Isaac. That’s so awesome! Do you know whose…”

“No.” Scott shrugs. “I mean, I guess we’ll be able to tell at some point?”

“Sure,” Stiles agrees. “If it comes out wearing a scarf, it’s probably not yours.”

Scott ignores that too. “But it doesn’t matter. I mean, the three of us are in this for forever, right? So any kids are all of ours.”

Stiles hugs him. “Ah, dude! Pack babies! Pack babies are the best!”

Scott sags a little in relief, and hugs him back. “Yeah, so don’t tell anyone yet, okay? It’s kind of a secret. At least until we figure out how to break it to Chris and my mom.”

“I thought they were cool with the poly thing?”

“Kind of? I mean, Mom is cool. She gets a strange kick out of telling people her son has a girlfriend _and_ a boyfriend, and watching the weird thing they do with their faces. But it might be different when there’s a baby? And I think Chris kind of likes me and Isaac, but also he kind of wants to cut our balls off a little bit too?”

“Is that because you’re both violating his daughter, or because you’re wolves?”

Scott thinks about that for a moment, and sighs. “Dude, I really don’t know. I’m too scared to bring it up.”

Stiles laughs, and Scott looks offended. “No, seriously, thank you for this. Here I am having this day totally stressing about Conor being back at school, but hey! At least I’m not in your shoes!”

Scott smiles and shakes his head. “Thanks, Stiles.”

“You guys are going to be awesome parents,” Stiles tells him. “Seriously. You’re all so adorable. And your mom is going to love her grandkid whether it’s genetically yours or Isaac’s. I can’t wait to get frantic middle of the night phone calls because the baby made a weird noise and you don’t know what to do.”

“I will have you on speed dial,” Scott smiles.

“I know you will. Can’t wait.”

Their hug is longer this time, and only broken when the door to the consultation room opens and Deaton walks inside. Deaton is in the very slow process of retiring and handing the clinic over to Scott so he can concentrate on his research into the supernatural, but he still comes in a few days a week.

“Ah, Stiles,” he says with a smile. “How are things?”

“Good,” Stiles says. “Really good.” He beams at Scott.

“He knows,” Scott says.

Deaton’s smile grows. “Well, I’m glad I caught you, Stiles. I’ve got something for you, if you’re interested.”

Stiles is expecting a book or an artifact. Something to do with his emissary duties, or the pack. He’s not expecting Deaton to vanish and reappear moments later with a glaring half-grown brown cat in his arms.

“It’s the evil cat!” Scott exclaims, and takes a step back.

“Evil? What?” Stiles steps forward and takes the cat out of Deaton’s arms. “No, you’re beautiful, aren’t you, cat?”

The cat blinks up at him with yellow eyes, and purrs.

“She’s part Burmese,” Deaton says. “She came into the shelter a few weeks ago and nobody claimed her. She’s not scared of dogs, and she’s not scared of werewolves either.”

“She bit me,” Scott mutters.

“Aw, did you?” Stiles asks the cat. “Was he trying to take your temperature? Because that deserves sudden and fierce retribution.” He grins at Deaton. “I’ll take her, obviously. I always wanted a cat.”

Obi-Wan snuffles around his feet, and the cat glares down at her imperiously.

“I remember,” Deaton says.

“The kittens you had that time… You said they wouldn’t survive? Did they?”

“I lost two out of the six,” Deaton says. “Three I found homes for, and one went home with me. He’s eleven now, but still going strong.”

“Huh.” Stiles strokes the cat.

It’s weird to think that a kitten he held only a few weeks ago could now be an old cat. It’s nice, too, that Deaton saved most of them. He hopes the trembly little tabby was one of them.

“Scott,” he says. “You have Derek’s credit card on file, right?”

“I think so.”

“Excellent.” He grins. “Let’s load my little bitey monster up with all the food and litter and sparkly toys she needs!”

“Derek is going to kick your ass.”

“Oh, please. If you think that’s how our relationship works, you haven’t been paying any attention at all.”

Scott laughs.

 

***

 

A few hours later, Stiles has the cat settled at home, more or less. By which he means he left the cat sitting on the dining room table and Obi-Wan wedged behind the couch cowering, and he figures they’ll have sorted themselves out by the time he gets back. He fully expects the cat to have established total dominance over the dog while he’s gone, and honestly won’t be surprised to come home and discover she’s also proclaimed herself God Emperor of the Universe, and Obi-Wan her slave.

He heads into town, glad of the few hours distraction the cat provided, but starting to worry more and more as he gets closer to town. He picks Luke up from daycare, straps him into his car seat, and heads for the elementary school. The Jeep grumbles and stutters its way there.

“Oh, wow, Der! Have you seen the new model Camaro?” he’d asked the night before, shoving his laptop in Derek’s face.

Derek had made an impressive bitchface. “That’s a convertible coupe.”

“I know!”

“We have three children. Do you really want to fuck around with car seats when there are no back doors?”

“Oh, but look! They have a sedan too!”

“For over twenty thousand dollars more.”

Stiles had made a sound like a dying walrus. “Well what do _you_ want to get?”

“I don’t know. Like a Toyota Camry or something?”

Stiles’s jaw had dropped. “What _happened_ to you?”

They’re probably going to get the Camry, to be honest.

Stiles pulls the Jeep into the parking lot, beside Derek’s cruiser. Derek’s working, but he’s here for moral support.

“Hey,” he says, straightening up from leaning on the back of the cruiser when Stiles steps out of the Jeep.

“Hey!” Stiles unbuckles Luke.

“Daddy! Sirens, Daddy?”

“Not right now, Luke,” Derek tells him with a grin, lifting him up for a hug. He leans in to kiss Stiles. “Why do you smell like cat?”

“I met one at the clinic today while Obi-Wan was getting her shots.” It’s not a lie, not exactly. Also, why spoil the surprise? The important thing is to let the kids see the cat first, so then Derek can’t say no. Stiles has it perfectly planned out.

If he’s settling for a Camry, he deserves a cat, dammit.

From inside the school the bell rings, and shortly afterward kids come streaming out the front doors. Claudie is somewhere in the front of the wave, chattering so hard to her little friends that she almost walks straight past her dads. Seriously, Stiles thinks that one day he’ll blink and when he opens his eyes again she’ll already be a teenager.

What happened to his little squishy baby girl? _Buh!_

Jesus, she’s so grown up.

Stiles packs that crisis away for later, and waves at her.

“Hi, Tata! Hi, Daddy!” She bounces over to them, her backpack swinging from one strap. “Hi, Luke!”

She slings her backpack into the back of the Jeep and proceeds to tell them absolutely everything that happened to her at school today, starting from the moment she arrived and Keisha gave her a friendship bracelet, except it broke, so Keisha’s mom is going to fix it tonight, and Claudie will get it back tomorrow. And all of that before class even started.

Stiles tries to pay attention, but the flood of kids from inside the school has become a trickle, and he still hasn’t seen Conor. Anxiety rises in him. He starts to walk toward the front doors of the school, skirting around a group of little boys involved in some serious negotiations involving candy on the steps.

“Stiles!” Derek calls.

Stiles hurries inside, heading for Conor’s classroom. It’s the first on the right.

“Stiles!” Derek calls, his voice louder this time.

Stiles spins around. “Derek, what if—”

What if Conor’s holed up in a corner crying?

“Take a breath, Stiles,” Derek tells him, catching him up. He lowers his voice. “I can smell him. His scent.”

“He’s okay?” Stiles asks, swallowing.

“Yeah.” Derek lifts his nose for a moment. “Yeah.”

At that moment, the door to Conor’s classroom swings open and a woman emerges. Stiles hasn’t met her before. She’s ridiculously cute, and flashes him a shy smile as she tugs a little girl out of the classroom behind her. The little girl is waving furiously. “Bye! Bye, Conor!”

Stiles’s heart skips a beat.

Conor bounces out of the classroom behind the woman and the girl. “Bye, Naoki! Bye, Kira!”

“Conor?” Stiles calls.

The woman stops. “Oh, hi. You must be Conor’s dads. I’m Kira. We’re new here.” She draws a breath. “We got here last week, and I’m still settling in, and _ugh_ , divorce, and none of our furniture has even arrived, and—” She flushes. “And you did _not_ want to hear my life story! Anyway, Naoki was so happy to have made a friend today, because she’s had a terrible time settling in so far, so of course I had to meet him, and then we made him late, but I’m so happy he’s back at school—was he sick? And wow, just feel free to stop me at any second.”

“I think I love you,” Stiles blurts out.

She looks as startled as he does.

Derek steps forward and does what he always does. Saves Stiles. “Hi, Kira, I’m Derek and this is Stiles. It’s nice to meet you. This is our daughter Claudie, and our youngest son, Luke.”

“Hi!” Kira gives them all an awkward wave, and then her eyes widen. “Alpha… _werewolf_?”

Derek regards her cautiously, and nods slowly.

“Oh, then we absolutely need to talk,” Kira says. “I was going to make contact with your emissary, it’s totally on my list of things to do, but I think my list is still stuck with my furniture somewhere between here and Sacramento, so…”

“I’m the emissary,” Stiles tells her. “Hi.”

“Hi!” she says again, and then her expression falls. “Oh, I had a formal speech prepared and everything!”

“I’m not a formal speech kind of guy,” Stiles tells her. “But you should absolutely come to dinner tonight. We have furniture you could sit on and everything.”

She flashes him a beautiful smile. “Okay! That sounds perfect!”

“Der,” Stiles whispers, and he’s not going to cry. He’s not. “Der, look!”

Conor and Naoki are huddled together, inspecting a picture that one of them drew. It’s a little boy and a little girl holding hands, and fuck it, if it’s Conor’s then Stiles is going to frame it, hang it on the wall, and force the entire pack to admire it.

Derek looks as overcome as Stiles feels. He pulls his gaze back to Kira. “Um, what are you?”

“Kitsune,” she says. “Naoki too. Is that going to be a problem?”

“No,” Stiles says, even though he’s totally going to have to Google what a kitsune is. “Absolutely not. No problem at all.”

“Daddy! Tata!” Conor holds up the picture. “Look what Naoki drew for me! She’s my best friend!”

No, Stiles isn’t crying. Not even a little bit.

“Tata, guess what Naoki’s name means in Japanese!”

“What?”

“Tree,” Conor says, his smile widening in delight. “We’re gonna be best friends forever!”

Naoki nods happily.

“I bet you are too,” Stiles says. What? It’s not like he can doubt his kid, can he? Not when he’s the most powerful mage the world has ever seen. “So, how would you like it if Kira and Naoki came over for dinner tonight?”

“Can they?” Conor looks at him like it’s fucking Christmas.

“Of course,” Stiles says. “You can show Naoki your room and your toys, and then you can introduce her to Obi-Wan and the cat.”

“Stiles?” Derek has his bitchface on again. “We don’t own a cat.”

“About that,” Stiles begins, and takes him by the hand.

Derek sighs.

They walk out of the school with Kira and the kids, and Conor and Naoki chattering excitedly behind them.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And...I'm out! 
> 
> Thanks for reading, and, as always, stories in this universe must end with ridiculous amounts of fluff. 
> 
> It's a rule, apparently.

**Author's Note:**

> I say this every time, but this time I mean it. I probably won't be posting a chapter a day like usual, mostly because that's crazy, but also because I have a bunch of other stuff I'm working on that pays bills and it's high time I learned to prioritise like an adult. But I hope to update every few days, so the wait shouldn't be too terrible. 
> 
> You can find my Tumblr here: [thisdiscontentedwinter](http://thisdiscontentedwinter.tumblr.com)


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